BOOK REVIEWS

The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Three Volumes. Edited by Alexander P. Kazhdan (editor in chief), Alice-Mary Talbot (executive editor), Anthony Cutler (editor for art history), Timothy E. Gregory (editor for archaeology and historical geography), and Nancy P. Šev enko (associate editor). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 2232 pp. $275.00.

Long after the need for a dictionary of Byzantine studies was first articulated by the late Gyula Moravcsik (Byzantinoslavica, 10 [1949]. 7), and in the wake--of several unsuccessful attempts at such a project, scholars centered at Dumbarton Oaks have produced such a compendium. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium is an invaluable reference work in which all participants can take pride. Over 5,000 ju- diciously selected main topic headings provide expert coverage of the Eastern Em- pire and its relations with the larger world. The majority of the articles are clear and concise (approximately 200 words), supplemented by longer survey articles (1,000+ words) devoted to broader subjects, such as "Byzantium, History of," "Councils," "Crusades," "Icons," "Women." The bibliographies appended to each article are selective, rather than exhaustive, and direct the interested reader to cur- rent literature which offers more complete bibliographic coverage. Geneial and bibliographic abbreviations are thoughtfully provided at the beginning of each volume, greatly facilitating use. Twenty-three skillfully conceived and executed maps supplement the text, in addition to twenty-two genealogical tables and nu- memus photographs. The care and effort expended by the editors, the staff and the 127 contributors in preparing these volumes is manifest throughout.

Scholars and students in all fields will find material of interest here. The his- tory of art and architecture is extensively covered. General articles, such as "Art," "Art and the West," and "Architecture," provide a broad overview. Other articles offer more detail in regard to individual genre (e.g., "Church Plans," "History Painting," "Icons," "Monumental Painting," "Portraits") and specific works and artists (cf. "Artists," "Architects" and individual headings). In addition, many arti- cles include a subheading, "Representation in Art," where applicable. Students of archaeology will appreciate the survey article, which accurately notes the failure of Byzantinists to make extensive use of the valuable material uncovered by ar- chaeologists (p. 154), and hopeful !y will stimulate efforts in that direction. Arti- cles focussing on specific sites (e.g., "Dura Europos," "Kerkyra," "Thessalonike") are equally useful.

The political (internal and foreign) and legal aspects of the Empire receive expert attention, both in survey articles (e.g., "Politics," "Law") and under spe- cific headings. Emperors and political activitists receive separate treatment; spe- cial articles guide the reader through the intricacies of legal and bureaucratic termi- nology and provide important information relating to specific laws and law codes. Politics "at the top" receives its due, but social history is not neglected. The felic- itous decision of the editors "to emphasize realia and the man [or may we say, per-

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son ?] in the street" (p. viii) finds expression in numerous fine articles illuminat- ing daily life in Byzantium. Topics ranging from "Family" to "Divorce" to ""Prostitution," from "Hawking" to "Games, Board" to "Sports," from "Artisan" to "Merchant" to "Transhumance," from "Diet" to "Meat" to "Famine" offer an in- triguing glimpse of the richness and complexity which characterized all levels of Byzantine life and society. Here, as elsewhere, the editors' interdisciplinary ap- proach and their decision to "go beyond the déjà connu and suggest new view- points and new solutions" (p. vii) is to be applauded.

Religion and the Church played an important role in the Empire and that role is reflected in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Survey articles such as "The- ology," "Monasticism," "Liturgy" are of high quality, as are individual articles fo- cussing on the Fathers of the Church, important prelates, saints, holy days, and so on. Of particular note in this area are the exceptionally concise, yet lucid explana- tions of the numerous heresies and disputes which disturbed the Church in this pe- riod (e.g., "Arianism," "Monophysitism," "Pelagianism," "Monarchianism"). The dictionary will be a good starting place for anyone seeking a guide through the maze of these disputes, or a useful complement to material found in The Dic- tionary of the Middle Ages. The survey article, "Popular Religion," and related ar- ticles provide a useful balance to our understanding of religion in this period. Sec- ular learning and letters are given equally broad coverage (e.g., "Astronomy," "As- trology," "Fables," "Pharmacology," "Stoicism," "Sappho," and an excellent sur- vey, "Translation," to name but a few).

Finally, the numerous articles devoted to the Slavic speaking areas of the "Byzantine commonwealth" and their relations with the Empire make these vol- umes an important reference work for Slavicists. Specialists have contributed im- portant articles on diverse topics as broad as "Bulgaria," "Serbia," and "Rus'" (including sections on the art, architecture and literature of the respective areas) and as specific as "Boris and Gleb," "Feodosij of Perera," "Kliment of Ochrid"; this arbitrary listing gives but a hint of the richness to be found here. Important kings, princes and generals merit separate headings. Such articles do great service by emphasizing the reciprocal ties that bound Byzantium and the Slavic speaking world in this critical period.

The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium should be greeted with enthusiasm and deserves a wide audience. The absence of an index is mitigated by meticulous cross-referencing and will pose no problem to the specialist; less advanced stu- dents, however, may regret this omission. Many of the excellent photographs which supplement the text would be enhanced by color, their impact heightened. Nonetheless, such reservations are minor in light of a reference work which fills such a great need and should become an essential part of all but the smallest aca- demic collections. It is to be hoped that wide distribution will not only assist re- search, but also stimulate increased interest in Byzantine studies.

Cathy Potter Kalamazoo College

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The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Joseph Held. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. lxxiv, 435 pp. $31.50.

The dramatic changes in Eastern Europe during the autumn of 1989 sparked a number of conferences, one of which took place at the Camden Campus of Rutgers University in February 1990. A group of specialists was invited to consider the transformation of the region in the historical context of the twentieth century, looking for both the past in the present, and the future in the past. The resulting papers make up the present volume, providing a country-by-country survey from Albania to Yugoslavia, with a discussion of East Germany thrown in. An introductory and concluding essay treating the region as a whole complete the of- ferings. All in all this work will be a useful, if incomplete, survey of the history of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.

The group of authors includes seven historians and four political scientists, and as might be expected, their contributions reflect the different approaches and concerns of their respective disciplines. Stephen Fischer-Galati's introductory chapter focuses on prospects for democratic development in Eastern Europe during three key periods, after 1918, 1945, and 1989. Discussing familiar external and internal influences that worked against democracy, he cites relative economic and social backwardness and nationalism as particularly significant. His pessimistic conclusion is that "present conditions are no better for making Eastern Europe safe for democracy than they were at the end of World War I" (p. 15). Many of these themes are echoed throughout the other chapters.

Among the authors whose contributions are devoted to single countries, the historians tended to opt for a straightforward chronological approach. This serves well in Nicholas C. Pano's chapter on Albania, Marin Pundeffs on Bulgaria, and Dimitrije Djordjevic's on Yugoslavia. The recurrent theme in Albania's and to some extent Bulgaria's twentieth-century experience is the struggle to organize a functioning state, preferably pluralistic and democratic, under conditions of severe economic crisis. In both these cases, the result as of the time of writing (May 1991) had been the survival of the successor to the deposed communist party as a political force. The leitmotif of Yugoslavia's experience as Djordjevic presents it could be summed up in this concluding sentence: "Yugoslavia is a community of antagonistic nations joined together because any other arrangement would be worse" (p. 342). The time between writing and publication has revealed just how much worse.

Hungary's chapter differs slightly from the others in that it is written by two authors, with P6ter Han6k discussing events from 1918 to 1945 and Joseph Held bringing the story down to the present. Generally avoiding the schizophrenia threatened by this approach, the authors successfully survey Hungary's twentieth- century development. Again, economic difficulties and the power of revived nationalism suggest to them that "it is not easy for democracy and freedom to take firm root in this battered region of Europe" (p. 204).

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Sharon Wolchik combines the chronological approach of the historians with the political scientists' preference for thematic structure in her chapter on Czechoslovakia. Her discussion traces three factors that helped shape Czechoslo- vakia's particular historical experience in this century, its level of economic de- velopment, its ethnic diversity, and its political attitudes and values. Though it shares with its neighbors an exposure to external forces beyond its control, Wolchik argues that the way Czechoslovakia will deal with its present challenges, as in the past, will be determined largely by these and other particular characteris- tics.

To analyze Poland, Andrzej Korbonski applies the well-worn developmental approach of Gabriel Almond, combined with analysis of systemic components taken from Samuel Huntington. While this choice gives Korbonski's chapter a clearly-defined structure, it creates a discussion that demands a high degree of previous familiarity with Poland's twentieth- century history. A similar comment might be made about Trond Gilberg's perceptive chapter on Romania. Gilberg adopts a political culture approach to focus on the aspects of Romania's past which still influence its present and possibly its future. He lists the absence of noblesse oblige, or the idea that high position carries responsibility, traditional authoritarianism among the masses, an inefficient and exploitative economic sys- tem, a penchant for direct solutions, and a legacy of corrupt bureaucracy and public schlamperei. The influence of these many legacies produces "a cloudy picture for the immediate, even the intermediate, future of the country" (p. 300).

Given the importance of Germany to the twentieth-century history of Eastern Europe, it makes sense that a chapter on Germany and Eastern Europe, by Melvin Croan, is also included in this book. However, the discussion focuses for the most part on East Germany's troubled existence since 1945, reflecting that peculiar geopolitical quirk that threw part of Germany into "Eastern Europe" as defined by postwar social science in the United States. Ivan V61gyes's concluding essay also reflects a typical social-science concern in asking "why were experts or specialists unable to predict events?" (p. 400).

The book contains a lengthy (sixty-nine pages) chronology of events in Eastern Europe which may provide useful reference. It is also generally well-produced, though one wonders why a press with Columbia's prestige cannot muster the diacritical marks necessary to print Latin-alphabet Slavic languages. Some editorial slips survived to the final version, for example, "mitigate against" appears twice in Fischer-Galati's chapter, but this does not really detract from the book's overall quality.

Drawing a single final impression from a book like this is often difficult. Each contribution has its own flavor, and together they do present a useful discussion of aspects of Eastern Europe's twentieth-century experience. One cannot help feeling, however, that this book wears its grandiose title rather uncomfortably.

Hugh L Agnew The George Washington University

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Michael F. Hamm. Kiev: A Portrait, 1800-1917. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. xviii, 304 pp. $29.95.

This is a meticulously researched, impressively detailed biography of a Ukrainian city in the late Russian Empire. The author briefly summarizes Kiev's early history, from its rise to "ruling center of the largest political entity in me- dieval Europe" in the eleventh century, followed by its decline and destruction ow- ing to political fragmentation, nomadic invasions, changing trade routes and Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century, to its penetration in the 1300s by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and incorporation into the Kingdom of Poland in 1569. In the seventeenth century control of Kiev became a highly contested issue. Poles, Russians and Ukrainians (Cossacks) fought over the city until Muscovy absorbed it in 1654. Moving into the modem period, Hamm presents a picture of Kiev in the eighteenth century as little more than a "fortress city, with soldiers from many places" adding to its mix of peoples. At the turn of the nineteenth century Kiev "impressed visitors as being little more than three barely connected settlements ... each 'village-like' in appearance." By the late 1800s, its growth markedly ac- celerating with the coming of the railroad, the city had been transformed into a vi- brant cosmopolitan metropolis pulsating with life, and displaying a richly tex- tured culture, all of which the author brings to life for us. He profiles a complex ur- ban center in flux, its population swelling from an unimpressive twenty thousand or so at the beginning of the century, to well over six hundred thousand by 1917. During this phase of historical development Kiev evolved from a city with a highly visible Polish presence to one that became heavily Russified, even as it re- tained a strong flavor of its native Ukrainian composition and culture.

For centuries, Hamm points out, Podil, the posad or trade and craft section and one of the three early settlements that comprised the city, was "synonymous with Kiev." In 1797 the Contract Fair, named for its land and agricultural product trans- actions, came to Kiev. It was accompanied by a rich blend of peoples-numerous foreigners who came to trade, landowners, merchants, peasants, priests, soldiers, confidence men, pickpockets, prostitutes, and various opportunists-and mingled with the local Ukrainians, Poles, Russians and Jews. This colorful, teeming poly- glot mass of humanity choked Podil, site of the Fair, and for three weeks around January the city's economy boomed. Kiev never became an industrial center, al- though numerous manufacturing enterprises were established there in the nine- teenth century, with the beet sugar industry providing the main stimulus to the city's economic development.

In his even-handed portrayal of a nineteenth-century city, whose early signifi- cance took centuries to recover from the Mongol onslaught, Hamm gives us chap- ters on Polish Kiev, Ukrainians in Russian Kiev, and Jewish Kiev. He describes the inter-ethnic and religious conflicts of these communities, and evaluates their impact on the evolution of Kiev into an impressive modern city. The work also includes a chapter on Kiev's cultural life and educational heritage, and for those who are interested in the emergence and growth of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire the author offers an excellent account of its development in

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Ukraine. He moves skillfully from discussions of political parties to the forma- tion of labor unions (competing with the older Russian-dominated artels), numer- ous and frequently unsuccessful labor strikes, and mutinies in the military.

Although sensitively conceived, generally well balanced and carefully written, this work does present some vexing problems. For instance, in his chapter on the early history of Kiev Hamm quotes from Charles Halperin's "Kiev and Moscow: An Aspect of Muscovite Thought," to emphasize that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Kiev no longer had any claim upon the Kievan Rus' inheritance. In light of the author's overall objectivity, one is puzzled by the way he has extrapolated this particular argument from its larger context, in which Halperin discusses the development of a Muscovite ideology for the legitimization of the young princi- pality's pretensions to the Kievan heritage. What Hamm might have said is that despite partial transfers Moscow was not a direct continuation of the Kievan state, and that the entire Kievan cultural heritage was not simply conveyed in toto to the northeast. In fact, even more of that legacy came westward to the principalities of Galicia and Volhynia, the lands of the Ukrainian southwest (later also to the Duchy of Lithuania), where it established the cultural continuity between Kievan Rus' and the Ukrainian nation.

Also inviting some skepticism is the author's reliance on Christine Worobec's appraisal of nineteenth-century Ukrainian peasant society-that element which constantly replenished the Ukrainian presence in Kiev, and helped to sustain the population growth in a city where the death rates exceeded the number of births- as a heavily patriarchal one. Indeed, historical evidence suggests a far more com- plex pattern. For instance, despite the overlay of a powerful patriarchal Russian culture that began with the onset of Russian colonial rule after the mid-seven- teenth century, Ukrainians did not abandon their emphasis upon female centricity. References to a matriarchal stereotype and images of strong women abound in Ukrainian lore. They have persisted in the popular imagination, and remain endur- ing themes in songs, literature, art, popular sayings, and more recendy in the me- dia.

The author's treatment of Kiev's pogroms, a painful issue which, for the most part, is handled with admirable objectivity and care, also needs some re examina- tion. A number of the numerous pogroms carried out in Kiev are carefully detailed, and a chapter is devoted to their treatment. Frequent references to the pogroms, however, are also found throughout the work, creating an impression of redun- dancy. Moreover, for all of the care taken by the author in his presentation of this highly charged issue, there is an element of internal inconsistency in this study. For example, the reader is referred to pages 124-25, where Hamm cites reports of pogroms that appeared in Zaria, in May of 1881. One of them states that the pogrom crowd included Great Russian artel workers. In another issue Zaria's ac- count of those detained for their complicity in the attacks on Jews noted that "the "";n,',, ""'A'" ;,.,,,,,;t...rJ h,,, frnm th> north" Anti p!\r1ip1' in

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of the Ukrainians when he charges, paradoxically, that the pogroms "were prod- ucts of the deeply entrenched anti-Semiticism of LTkraine."

In his account of the death of Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian poet-painter and staunch advocate of Ukrainian emancipation, Hamm refers to Shevchenko's death on March 10, 1861, and the boat which carried him through Kiev to his final rest- ing place in Kaniv on June 6. Telling us nothing of what occurred between March and June, he leaves his readers to wonder why it took so long for the poet to be laid to rest. In point of fact, Shevchenko was first buried in Smolensky Cemetery, in St. Petersburg, only to be disinterred (following official permission to move him), placed in a lead coffin, then taken to Kaniv for reburial. A detail to be sure; but filling in such gaps would render this an even better study than it already is. And finally, although the author is himself aware of the pitfalls of trying to disen- tangle Ukrainian names, toponyms and terms from their commonly used Russian versions, and makes a valiant effort to do so, a few errors haveccrept in. A case in point is the word for Christmas tree, for which Hamm uses the Russian variant ela rather than the Ukrainian ialynka, even when he makes it clear that he is dis- cussing the decorated Ukrainian tree.

But these are relatively minor lapses in what is otherwise a superbly crafted work. It offers many insights into the life of an important city in the late Russian Empire, one with a brilliant cultural legacy, a colorful and variegated population, and a frequently shifting identity. Not only will historians of Ukraine, Russia and Eastern Europe find that this work expands their factual knowledge and apprecia- tion of Kiev's cultural complexity, it is also a valuable resource for social and ur- ban historians. Undergraduates and casual readers too will find their understanding of a major East European urban center significantly enhanced by this appealing portrait of a city.

Marian J. Rubchak Valparaiso University

W. H. Zawadzki. A Man of Honour: Adam Czartoryski as a Statesman of Russia and Poland 1795-1831. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. 374 pp. $84.00.

This highly polished and intricate monograph probably exhausts all there is to say about its main character's political manouvers on behalf of his family, and by extension, his nation. The subject--Czartoryski, the historical genre-diplomacy, the focus--external events and their documents all combine to place this reviewer in the position of a commoner admitted to a royal anteroom. That is so because this reviewer is not practiced in diplomatic history and its catechism and can judge the work only as an outsider, albeit a historian. To this outsider the work appears flawless, either because it is or because this historian lives in a different topical topography and therefore is not able to adequately judge the terrain.

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After saying "yes" to this scholarly and obviously labor-intensive project, the reviewer, hoping that this is not considered rude and ungrateful, moves out of the anteroom into a sphere more comfortable and familiar-- that of social history. The words that follow are simply musings from someone who could never begin to do what this monograph accomplishes, but who in reading it saw opportunities for her own area of interest. The presumption in giving voice to ideas which occurred in reading of this work perhaps can be excused as an attempt to find a common path for those who do "traditional" history and those who are engaged in the "new stuff." Neither way excludes the other so the remarks that follow are never meant to suggest that the author "should have" done anything more than he did.

At the outset it is important to note that Czartoryski's political career as "Statesman of Russia and Poland" stemmed from a personal connection with Tsar Alexander and that his effectiveness, as a European political player, was always dependent on having the Tsar's "ear." In that sense, how is Czartoryski's situation different from eighteenth-century Polish noble women who were married off to serve family strategic interests? Chapter 1 concludes: "But whatever Czartoryski's personal feelings were, the family's economic interests, and consequently its social and political status, had to be protected. The journey to St. Petersburg had to go ahead." .

The story of Czartoryski, the politician, arises out of Poland's internal and external problems at the end of the eighteenth and start of the nineteenth century. Anyone familiar with this part of history already knows thz plot, which is that Poland, weak and no longer independent, had to rely on the power, and good will, of one or more of her more powerful European neighbors, and that Czartoryski happened to bet on Russia as the power most likely to serve Polish interests and on Napoleon as the concomitant enemy. His opportunity to serve and star was facilitated by his friendship (much of which stemmed from the sharing of a certain liberal ideology) with Alexander, but his chances of success were blighted by another of Alexander's personal connections--the one with the Hohenzollerns, who played the fly in Czartoryski's ointment, if one can so call his Mordplan.

Of the many interesting threads which a social historian might pick to unravel in this story, one of the more prominent might be that Czartoryski's world was on the wane (though he and his contemporaries did not grasp that) and that very soon family interests and strategies as well as arbitrary political power resting in dynastic hands would become shaken by a different agenda which necessitated support from the hitherto "voiceless" masses and entailed attention to a form of loyalty which precluded the type of arrangement which gave Czartoryski access to the Tsar's ear and which allowed the Tsar to act upon his personal ties to the Hohenzollems.

Is it realistic to envision the possibility of collaboration between the expert on, for example, Czartoryski the "statesman of Russia and Poland" and Czartoryski the "child, family member, husband, father, man of feeling and opinion?" If so, how would that occur?

Bogna Lorence-Kot California College of Arts and Crafts

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Daniel Beauvois. The Noble, the Serf and the Revizor: The Polish Nobility and the Ukrainian Masses (1831-1863). Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991. vi, 277 pp. $74.00 ($44.00 for individuals).

Daniel Beauvois's study of the Polish nobility of Russian-ruled western Ukraine between the uprisings of 1830 and 1863 first appeared in French in 1985, and we now have this fine work in an English translation. At times, however, the transla- tion makes one want to reach for the original. An ideal translation ought to be in- visible, but this one is apparent in awkward English expressions that sometimes lead to ambiguity and confusion. One has to think a moment to puzzle out the meaning, for example, of the title of the last chapter: "A Threat to Arcady." A lack of diligent editing compounds the problem. The index lists only names of persons and places; there is no bibliography. Beauvois's work deserves better.

In addition to filling a gap in the literature in English on Polish history, this study has several other virtues. The topic itself lies within the province of histori- ans of Russia and of Ukraine, yet they are unlikely "to excavate this dead planet, this forgotten world" (p. xvii). Such is the fate of those who do not fit into the "national" histories in which we package our courses and research. That a French scholar should take up this topic enhances the possibility that he did so with no special interest or national bias. Nevertheless, his is no passionless, cool account without any judgments. Instead, often in colorful language, he sympathizes with each victim of oppression in turn, whether Ukrainian or Polish. Finally, the work rests on a solid foundation of archival sources that allow the author to answer ques- tions thought unanswerable and to challenge accepted versions of the past. Fur- thermore, he blends these archival sources with evidence derived from memoirs and works of fiction.

Devoting each chapter to a different section of the population of the region, Beauvois organized his material sensibly, though those less familiar with the area's history and the Russian administrative structure sometimes have to wait un- til a later chapter for an explication of a particular reference and occasionally never find one. The author excluded from his study the Jews of the region, who ac- tually outnumbered the Poles but who figured less directly than the Ukrainian pop- ulation in the relationship between the authorities and the Poles, which consti- tutes the main theme of the book. Thus, the author addresses the classic Polish dilemma of the nineteenth century, whether to resist alien rule or cooperate with it. The delusions that he connects with either alternative leaves the reader with an overwhelming feeling of the hopelessness of the situation of the Polish nobleman of the region. "The Ukraine has been the laboratory and the Poles, the guinea pigs, of the first Russian experiment in the digestion of a vast, social group" (p. 265).

Beauvois portrays the treatment of the Ukrainian peasantry by their Polish masters as one of unrelenting cruelty. Although one might be tempted to ask how typical are the many examples he extracted from criminal court records, the acquit- tals and light sentences in these cases suggest a widespread acceptance of the mal- treatment of serfs. How deluded were Polish revolutionaries in their fantasy that

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the Polish nobleman of Ukraine would forgo his exploitation of peasant labor and that the Ukrainian peasant would then join the fight for the "Polish" cause of his master! The authorities used the maltreatment of the peasantry as a pretext to in- tervene against the Polish nobleman. The result was the Inventories Law, which made the lands allocated to the peasants inviolable, a measure that Beauvois chides "Western historians" (p. 32) for ignoring when they claim that the 1861 re- form was the only institutional change in the peasants' situation in the Russian Empire.

The second chapter describes the fate of the vast majority of the Poles of the re- gion, the 340,000 landless nobles: "history can offer few examples, of such mag- nitude, of policies of extinction directed towards one social group, and conducted so scientifically and unremittingly over a period of thirty years by both bureau- cratic measures and by Police harassment" (p. 107). For Russian officials, nobles without land were both an intolerable anomaly and a dangerous, restive element. Contradicting the claims of Polish historians, Beauvois denies that plans to de- port 5,000 of these poor nobles to the Caucasus were ever carried out. Instead, they were condemned to a social and cultural death by being reduced "to slavery" (p. 92) and deprived of educational opportunities.

Beauvois next tells the story of the tiny minority of Polish noblemen who openly accepted Russian rule to the extent of participating in Russian institu- tions. He scornfully portrays them as more concerned with maintaining their ex- ploitation of the peasantry than identifying with the Polish nation. Finally, in the longest chapter, Beauvois considers the position of the majority of the 70,000 Polish noble landowners. Here Beauvois sees the primary coercive mea- sure in the ukaz of 1850, which forced Polish nobles who owned more than a hun- dred souls to enter government service.

Beauvois tells a sad but fascinating tale. History's losers too often escape our attention. But this is not a story without contemporary relevance. In this case, we see how systematically the Russian authorities sought to destroy a national mi- nority. Let us hope that in rejecting the practices of the previous regime, Russia's rulers do not revert to an even older tradition.

John J. Kulczycki University of Illinois at Chicago

Robert Weinberg. The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps. Bloom- ington : Indiana University Press, 1993. xvi, 302 pp. $29.95.

Eisenstein's images have created a permanent association between the Revolu- tion of 1905 in Odessa and the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. The mutiny as a factor in the rising revolutionary tide figures prominently in Robert Weinberg's excellent new study of the urban revolution of 1905, The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps. The allusion to violence in the book's subtitle, how- ever, brings to mind another distinctive feature of Odessa's 1905 revolution: not only the bloody cossack assault on the revolutionary crowd at the time of the

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naval revolt in June, but the violent anti-Jewish pogrom that broke out following promulgation of the October Manifesto. Weinberg's treatment focuses on Odessa's workers and the rapid growth of labor activity during that year. Workers in this southern port and commercial center, he contends, may have played an even greater role in events than their counterparts in the more thoroughly studied northern capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Throughout the year, however, there was a tension between the rapid development of workers' political awareness and often militant labor activity, and spontaneous outbursts of violence, carried out quite often by members of this same working class: "This tension-between restraint and organization on the one hand, and violence and fury on the other" (p. 1431is a recurring motif in Weinberg's account of the revolutionary events.

Weinberg has made extensive use of Soviet archival holdings and the local press, among other sources, as a basis for his carefully researched study. The first three chapters uncover the roots of Odessa's revolution, beginning with a descrip- tion of the distinctive characteristics of this relatively young city, with its econ- omy based on the export trade and its large non-Russian population, particularly the Jewish minority. Weinberg then analyzes the diverse working population, which he ranges along a continuum from skilled, urbanized metalworkers, through small shop artisans, to the dock workers and other day laborers at the bottom of the occupational scale. Finally, he sketches the history of the labor and revolu- tionary movements: the radical activity of 1905 grew out of a prehistory of work- ers' participation in mutual aid societies, Zubatov organizations, and revolution- ary circles going back to the 1870s. The major part of the book traces the trajec- tory of the 1905 movement, bringing out the ways in which the Odessa revolution in some respects followed its own timetable (for example, in the weak response to Bloody Sunday), while in others it mirrored national patterns.The movement peaked twice: in June, a general strike overlapped with the Potemkin mutiny; in October, an even larger general strike was soon followed by the bloody pogrom. Spurred by the promises of the October Manifesto, workers of all kinds were form- ing trade unions by November and December, and workers succeeded in creating their own form of political representation in a city-wide soviet, before martial law was imposed.

Weinberg emphasizes several factors in his analysis of the labor movement: the connection between occupation and form of collective action; the intersection of workers' economic grievances and political events; and the fact that in 1905 the labor movement in Odessa, as throughout the Empire, became a struggle for "dig- nity" and "citizenship," part of a broader revolutionary movement including other classes. Weinberg describes 1905 as a year of accelerated political education for workers and makes a strong case for the influence of previous revolutionary and labor movement experience on the eruption of militant activity during that year. Weinberg stresses, however, that workers remained independent of the revolution- ary parties in 1905: Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, and others par- ticipated, but did not control the movement. Perhaps the most controversial as- pect of the book is the author's interpretation of worker violence, a theme also treated in the recent work by Charters Wynn. Weinberg refers to the workers' "el-

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emental and unarticulated anger" (p. 120) and the "dual nature" of worker protest, which could manifest itself in the form of labor militance in a general strike, or in such violent episodes as the looting of the port in June. In 1905, Weinberg finds, economic insecurity and the breakdown of political authority exacerbated tensions between Russians and Jews, leading to the October pogrom and undercutting the growing solidarity and organization of Odessa's workers.

Weinberg's thoughtful discussion of local anti-Semitism, relations between Russian and Jewish workers, and the composition of violent crowds in 1905 raises questions for further research. He argues, for example, that the pogrom and other violent actions were carried out mainly by the "rootless" migrant population of day laborers occupying the bottom rung of his occupational ladder, he does note, however, that other kinds of workers also participated in the pogrom. More evi- dence on this point would be helpful. Weinberg's impressive study will further broaden the debate on the nature of the Russian working class and its forms of col- lective action. As the first detailed examination of Odessa in 1905 and the com- plex ethnic tensions that helped shape the course of events, this book makes a major contribution to the historiography of the 1905 Revolution.

Deborah Pearl Cleveland State University

George S. N. Luckyj. Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917-1934. Revised and updated. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. xv, 351 pp. $37.50 cloth; $19.95 paper.

I have admired George S. N. Luckyj's Literary Politics in the Ukraine, 1917- 1934 for so long that it seems strange to review it now. Luckyj's clairvoyant study, growing out of a dissertation and turning into a life-long concern, was first published in 1956. It was republished in 1971. Fortunately, Duke University Press has now published a revised and updated edition of this pioneering work.

This judicious and multifaceted account of Ukrainian literature, culture, and po- litical tragedy deals with the seventeen years of what we used to call the Leninist revolution from below and the Stalinist revolution from above. Topically, Luck- yj's work remains what it had been to begin with. In this case, "updated" means the author's reappraisal of his own research and, in the new last chapter, his evalua- tion of the impact of glasnost' on the new approach to the twenties and thirties.

Access to new materials allowed Luckyj to conclude, for instance, that he had underestimated the savagery of the Stalinist extermination of Ukrainian writers. Referring to his own publication of 1987, "Keeping a Record: Literary Purges in Soviet Ukraine (1930)" (Edmonton, 1988), Luckyj says: "I came to the conclusion that 254 writers, literary scholars, and critics had been victims of the purges and that only very few survived in the Gulag up to 1956, when they were released and rehabilitated. The iron sweep of party controls was much greater than I had thought in 1956." (p. xiii) And in the new concluding chapter he adds: "Unex- pected help in estimating the losses came from a Russian source. In 1988 a Rus-

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sian researcher Edouard Bel'tov published the results of his study of the purges of all Soviet writers. Among them 'almost 500' came from the Ukraine" (p. 258).

Da capo. Luckyj's detailed, rich, and lucid account of aspirations and hopes for national liberation described by Ukrainian writers starts with a glance back at tra- ditions and the pre-revolutionary era. God knows, hopes for cultural independence were crushed under tsarism time and time again. And it is, indeed, the revolution of 1917 that promised the Ukrainian people self-respect, self-determination and self- expression. One might even say the Ukrainian national rebirth was implicit in the Leninist dogma. Ukrainian literature, at any rate, was supposed to flourish under the curious formula "national in form and socialist in content."

It did not. Only the mighty powerful among the rulers probably knew exactly when and

how that which was national in form began gliding from plain nationalism into lethal bourgeois nationalism.

Luckyj's book explores the failure of national liberation. It deals with betrayal, mockery of initial semantic agreements, followed by arrests, executions, suicides, purges of purgers ... literary politics, indeed, leading to the torture and disfig- urement of the Ukrainian creative intelligentsia, to its martyrdom.

Part of the ordeal was an individual decision to compromise. Luckyj calls it ac- ceptance of controls. Some did. Some did not Luckyj is truly wise in handling this issue. He does not permit himself to castigate those who tried to survive and suc- ceeded :

In the history of Soviet Ukrainian literature, in particular for each of the writers '

who has seemed able to accept controls (Tychyna, Ryls'kyi, Bazhan, Panch, Ianovs'kyi, Holovko, Vyshnia, Komiichuk, Le, Malyshko), it is possible to point to one who did not accept them (Khvyl'ovyi, Kulish, Pidmohyl'nyi,

'

Zerov, Pluzhnyk, Antonenko-Davydovych, Vlyz'ko, Burevii, Slisarenko, Dosvitnyi). And if among the latter group (in talent alone certainly the equal of the first) there may have been some whose heresies were not essentially anti- Communist in spirit, so among the first group there may be many opportunists and quietists ... " (p. 242).

In a way-no, in every way-it is sad that Luckyj's complex, comprehensive, convincing story, involving so many people, ends where it does-before the war. Perhaps it is a Luckyj kind of volume or volumes on Ukrainian literature during the Second World War and its aftermath that might help explain the healing of some wounds and the advent of new ailments and hatreds in today's Ukrainian-Russian mess.

During the purges of the thirties, as Luckyj testifies, the term Khvyl'ovism was coined to point out the rebelliously unyielding defense of Ukrainian national val- ues that turned, indeed, suicidal. Mikola Khvyl'ovyi, after being mercilessly at- tacked by Postyshev (Stalin's factotum), shot himself on May 13, 1933, that spring of arrests, deportations, executions. The not so remote future, however came to offer an alternative outcome. Two of Khvyl'ovyi's contemporaries, two of

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the best known and most talented poets, Vladimir Sosiura (1897-1965) and Maksym Rylskyi (1895-1964), responded to the unspeakable ordeal of their na- tive land with passionate patriotism. They became heroes. It is hard to forget So- siura's Chervonim Voi'nam (To the Red Warriors) of 1941. There was a Soviet Union. And it wasred. Millions of warriors died. Poets grieved.

And then what? It has become such a dreary clichd to enforce more and more concentration on

the past. Never mind. I would like to conclude my salute to George Luckyj by quot- ing another of his perceptive thoughts, formative in regard to his study of the tur- bulent twenties and thirties:

The conflict ... was the inevitable outcome of the relationship between Kharkov and Moscow, formed in 1919, based on the fallacy of conditional and circumscribed cultural freedom and granted to the former by the latter under the pressure of historical circumstances. While many Ukrainian writers nourished illusions about the success of a literature "national in form and socialist in content," as patterned in Moscow, they cannot be blamed for the ultimate perversion of this impracticable goal into an instrument of Soviet Russian cultural imperialism. On the contrary, they were the first to detect its true character and to fight it, defending that betrayed ideal and the conception of individual and national art which makes artistic freedom indivisible (pp. 232- 33).

Vera S. Dunham New York

George O. Liber. Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Chanege in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923-1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xx, 289 pp. $59.95.

Studies of Soviet nationality policies in the early Stalinist period are not yet common. We lack truly detailed accounts of the impact of the NEP, early Stalinist policies in economics and culture, as well as political developments at the repub- lican and oblast" level. Another way of saying this is that our historiography to date has been excessively Russocentric and we now are paying the price for that omission. This book, however, aims to rectify that lacuna in our analysis by unit- ing the study of language and socio-economic policy and their consequences in Ukraine from 1923-34.

As Liber understands and states throughout the book, Soviet policy was, to use my own term, dialectical. In sponsoring and subsidizing national cultural institu- tions and economic development after 1921 the Soviet regime created the prereq- uisites for modern national development among the minorities. On the other hand, Soviet policy hoped thereby to deprive nationalism of its capability to disrupt the new state. That is it hoped to give enough nationalism to allow it scope so that national sentiment could then be turned towards an internationalist direction.

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When it found that its own policies had failed to stop that nationalist current, it turned around and reversed those policies beginning in the early 1930s. That re- versal became ubiquitous by the XVII Party Congress in 1934. While Liber would have probably strengthened his argument even more had he looked at other na- tionalities of the USSR and found the same trends, his account of policy in the Ukraine largely fills that gap we cited for this republic.

As the book notes, nativization, korenizatsiia, and particularly the sponsor- ship of the Ukrainian language, became the key policy of the twenties and efforts to promote socio-economic development and its usual outcome, urbanization, consciously had the goal of promoting native language use and native language institutions in state and society. But this backfired in the Ukraine. Bolshevik leaders and the Party elite were quite Russified if not Russian and suspicious of Ukrainianization from the start. Ukrainian "national Communists" like Skrypnyk and Khvylovy, on the other hand, enthusiastically promoted that policy through- out the 1920s. Consequently as nativization took off and the first tangible signs of Ukrainians' dominance of their own republic in culture and politics took shape, the Ukraine became an object of suspicion in Moscow and was a constant battle- ground within Soviet domestic politics. That situation continued right up to the end of the L7SSR in 1991 and into our own times where Moscow and Kiev have not yet resolved their mutual relationship.

Those Soviet sponsored developmental policies failed to arrest or limit nation- alist moods. Consequently Ukraine paid a horrific price for its early assertion of its own identity. But Ukraine never fully lost its memory of those terrors and they inspired the dissident movements that ultimately won in 1989-91. The forms that nationalist development took were fairly similar to those of other Central and East European peoples where cities and the appurtenances of modern culture and indus- try were essential instruments of nationalist rebirth. And equally, as the newspa- pers and TV daily remind us, the history of those developments remains a vital source of political inspiration and contestation to this day.

Stephen Blank US Army War College

David R. Marples. Stalinism in the Ukraine in the 1940s. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. xix, 228 pp. $65.00.

This book is a collection of nine essays on the general theme of the incorpora- tion into the USSR of western Ukrainian territories taken from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Two chapters are adapted from previously published journal articles; most of the rest are from the author's University of Sheffield dis- sertation. Most of the essays can be read independently, but taken together they present a coherent picture of an important topic which has indeed been neglected in both Soviet and Western historiography. There are some overlaps and duplica- tions and maps would have been extremely helpful.

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Chapter 1 covers familiar ground on the nature of Stalinism, the question of its inevitability and whether or not Stalin was a logical product of Lenin's policies. Marples' discussion adds little to these debates. He does agree that the case for de- liberate genocide during the collectivization famine has not been proved, and ar- gues that Stalin had no particular animosity toward Ukrainians as a group.

Later chapters focus on two major themes: collectivization and the experiences of the region during World War n. Collectivization began in the short period of Soviet control prior to the Nazi invasion. It was reversed during the war, but car- ried out again in the late 1940s. In both periods, the Soviet authorities employed large numbers of Russian and Eastern Ukrainian cadres. As in the 1930s, there were hunts for largely mythical kulaks and widespread use of coercion to meets targets imposed from above. Indeed, as Marples notes, it is depressing that Moscow seems to have learned nothing about how to collectivize from the experi- ence of the 1930s. The second theme, the fate of the western Ukraine and the be- havior of its inhabitants during the German occupation, is loaded with emotional issues. Just as some local people were pleased by early Soviet actions against Pol- ish landowners in 1939-40, so many welcomed German units as liberators from the Communists. Most were soon disabused of any sympathy for the Axis cause by the brutal behavior of the German occupation forces. The peoples of the western Ukraine, like many of Stalin's other subjects, were caught between two horrible choices. Many simply tried to survive; a few collaborated with one side or the other, and some fought against both German and Soviet forces. Marples handles the moral questions gingerly, but is fair and judicious. While sympathetic to the Ukrainians, he does not dismiss collaboration with the Germans or with Stalin, and criticizes wartime and postwar terrorism of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). He acknowledges the problem of war crimes and makes the interesting sug- gestion that ethnic politics have had a crucial impact on the hunt for war criminals in the USA and Canada. In the United States, the Office of Special Investigations, spurred on by Jewish citizens, hunted for alleged war criminals with zeal and was willing to cooperate with Soviet intelligence to build cases. On the other hand, the Deschenes commission was regarded with hostility by Canadians of Ukrainian descent and much less investigative work was done.

The essays in this collection deal with sensitive and important issues. Marples has used an extensive array of published and secondary sources to summarize and advance our knowledge. But much remains to be done. The UPA and other resis- tance groups remain shadowy. Popular attitudes towards Poles, Jews, Eastern Ukrainians, Germans, and Soviets need to be explored. We need to learn much more about the process of collectivization and responses to it. Marples has prob- ably done about as much as can be accomplished with the limited sources available to him, and he has established a foundation for further research. His book shows the urgent need for archival work in newly opened repositories and suggests that prompt use of oral and private sources will pay rich rewards.

K. David Patterson University of North Carolina at Charlotte

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Myron B. Kuropas. The Ukrainian Americans, Roots and Aspirations, 1884-1954. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. xxix, 534 pp. $50.

All immigrant populations in the United States have shared certain common problems and experiences, but each has had its own particular travails and tri- umphs. In this work on Ukrainian immigrant society, seven decades of difficulties and achievements are traced in terms of the differences that distinguished the two waves of immigrants prior to World War II. This study developed from the author's doctoral dissertation, and it makes extensive use of the immigrant press, memoirs, interviews, other dissertations, archives, private papers, polemical works, yearbooks, commemorative publications, and a variety of monographs. Dr. Kuropas has had the benefit of his close personal knowledge and experiences, but he has also succeeded in writing with disarming frankness and objectivity, not concealing any blemishes.

The author clarifies many issues, controversies, and events in what was a complex process of transformation and development from a Ruthenian (Rusyn) religio-cultural identity to a Ukrainian ethno-national identity. He outlines the different conditions in Eastern Galicia, Bukovina, and Carpatho-Ukraine which resulted in the various conflicting orientations and different levels of conscious- ness. He also skillfully relates the immigrants' concerns and actions to events in Ukraine.

The difficulties and. appalling conditions of the early years of immigrant life in the coal mining and steel mill communities are detailed. It is not suprising that the first Ukrainian Catholic priest, Reverend Ivan Wolansky and other clerics were active in the Knights of Labor and supported strike activity. However, the principal focus is on the emergence of Ukrainian ethno-national identity. Thus the newspaper Svoboda, as early as February 1901, called on the immigrants to follow the example of the Irish "in the fight for the freedom of the old country" and subsequently warned against relying on the Habsburgs or on a Russia that represents "national slavery, hell for peasants and workers, darkness and decay and the end of our people" (p. 104). It characterized the Romanov tercentenary as a "black jubilee" (p. 106).

The divisions among the Ruthenian immigrants were disruptive but both the Uhro (Carpatho) Rusyn Greek Catholic and the Russian Orthodox orientations proved to be historically inconsequential. The former was unable to develop much beyond a denominational identity that became further diluted as the result of assimilation. The latter orientation (Russophilism and affiliation with Russian Orthodoxy) affected only a minority and proved to be untenable because its ad- herents could only pretend to be "Russian" and could not acquire a genuine Russian identity.

The author acknowledges the handicaps imposed by Rome and the American Irish Catholic hierarchy on the Ruthenian Greek Catholics; the celibacy issue, the question of the legal title to parish property, and the perceived specter of La- tinization-all served to drive immigrants into Orthodoxy, whether Ukrainian or "Ruissian." He describes the activities of the Russian Synod in North America and

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its "windfall" in recruiting to Orthodoxy the Greek Catholic priest Alexis Toth (Tovt) who came from north-eastern Slovakia. While correctly emphasizing the Synod's subsidization of the politico-religious missionary effort, he does not ad- equately emphasize the Russian Empire's recruitment of the sons of immigrants for training as priests and as agents of "Russification." It should be noted that the Synod's church officially called itself Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of North America, and its mutual aid society continues to call itself "Orthodox Catholic"--quaint testimony to its efforts to sow confusion and attract Ruthenian Greek Catholics having weak ethnic identity. The Synod's clerics also sought to propagate the notion that Ukraine was a "denial" of "Rus"' rather than its modem embodiment as Ukrainian nationalism contended in the face of the Empire's usurpation of the Kievan succession.

Much attention is given to the three conflicting Ukrainian orientations of the inter-war period: the communists, the monarchists (Hetmanites) and the na- tionalists of the OUN-ODWU. A review cannot do justice to the complexity of these matters where Ukrainian Catholics supported Hetman Skoropadsky, who was Orthodox, and Ukrainian socialists opposed the OUN but remained nationalists. These divisions weakened the immigrant community and led to an orchestrated defamation campaign by non-Ukrainian detractors.

However, there were achievements as when the immigrants were able to spon- sor a Ukrainian pavillion at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair at a time when Ukraine was engulfed by the famine and dead silence imposed by Stalin. The national choir, sent abroad by the Ukrainian Republic in 1919, and its conductor Alexander Koshetz had a very positive influence. Vasyl Avramenkos' instruction brought authentic Ukrainian dance to the children of immigrants.

The author has little to say of the activities of the Ukrainian Congress Com- mittee of America during its first decade, and there is no mention of Professor Lev Dobriansky. The concluding emphasis is on the plight of the displaced persons who constituted the third wave of Ukrainian immigration. This very different im- migrant population included many professional persons and an intelligentsia that greatly changed the Ukrainian-American community. A sequel to this outstanding work should recount the four decades of educational and scholarly activity that received vindication in the remarkable events of 1991 in the Ukrainian homeland.

John S Reshetar, Jr. University of Washington

Sophie Dubnov-Erlich. The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora, Nationalism and Jewish History. Translated by Judith Vowles. Edited by Jeffrey Shandler. Introductory Essay by Jonathan Frankel. Afterword by Victor Erlich. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. x, 285 pp. $29.95.

This book represents a unique document on Simon Meyerovitch Dubnov (1860- 1941), the great Jewish historian, author of the ten-volume World History of the Jewish People, and the exponent of Jewish cultural autonomy in the Diaspora. It

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combines the English translation of Sophie Dubnov-Erlich's biography of her father, together with an integrated analysis of the two facets of his character- historian and ideologist-thanks to Jonathan Frankel, and a personal testimony in the form of an Afterword by one of Dubnov's grandchildren, Victor Erlich.

S. M. Dubnov's present biography, which was hitherto available only in Russian, is essentially a synthesis of the first two volumes of the autobiography published by the historian himself, a work which is both a monument of intellectual history and an essential reflection of the period. The first two volumes of Kniga zhizni were published in Riga in 1934. The third volume was published in New York in 1957. The complete autobiography is in the process of being translated into French, and will be published by Edition du Cerf, Paris, in 1994. In . the last section of Dubnov-Erlich's book, covering the years from 1922 to 1941, the author, who thought that the third part of the autobiography had been lost, had to reconstruct the differents events in S. M. Dubnov's life on the basis of her own personal memories and those of others.

Sophie Dubnov-Erlich has undoubtedly chosen to take a self-effacing pose with respect to her father. The stages of the great historian's life are reconstructed step by step: beginning with his childhood in Mstislav, and a description of the crucial role played by his grandfather Bentsion, through the years he spent in St. Petersburg, Odessa or Vilna and up to his exile in Berlin and later Riga - an exile resulting from the vicissitudes of history. Following the main outline of the autobiography, the author traces the intellectual and ideological development which led the historian, at the dawn of the twentieth century, to establish systematicaily the foundations of his historiosophical approach and of his Diaspora nationalism which he would defend until the end of his life.

One regrets, though, the absence in this work of any mention of the ideological and political discussions which must have taken place between Dubnov and his daughter. After all, the biographer (1885-1986) was a poet and a journalist in her own right, as well as a militant Bundist and wife of H. Erlich, the famous Polish Bund leader assassinated by Stalin. She does introduce some sense of the role which had been played by Ida, Dubnov's wife, as Jonathan Frankel has noted in his introductory essay. Dubnov's love of nature is also discussed. In general terms, however, the portrait of the man behind the historian remains somewhat indistinct. In this respect, Victor Erlich's contribution is important here, adding a moving description of his grandfather as a man of the nineteenth century who was somewhat left behind by the times.

In his essay, Jonathan Frankel analyzes what is probably the most original aspect of S. M. Dubnov's thought, his synthesis of ideology and history. Dubnov's evaluation of the present position of the Jewish nation and his views on its future were based on a very sound knowledge of its past; its history was in turn written in accordance with an ideological "key" which endowed it with internal logic. This combined perspective of the historian and ideologist does not erase the tensions which were considerably sharpened by the tragedies of his era. Could his emphasis on the role of the various migrations in the history of the Jewish people-migrations which were always intertwined with persecutions-be

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reconciled with his optimistic description of the autonomous existence enjoyed by Jews at different periods? Could belief in the inevitability of progress be maintained in the era of pogroms?

Dubnov undoubtedly stood out in his time, as Frankel explains, by virtue of his humanism, individualism and liberalism. One might be tempted to add: by the pluralistic vision of Judaism proposed by this intransigent nationalist, who was ready to bring together under one roof all streams-socialist or liberal, religious or secular, Zionist or Bundist-as long as there was agreement on the need to preserve the cultural existence of the Jewish people. This is just one more reason for agreeing with Jonathan Frankel when he predicts that Dubnov-as political thinker and historian-is still an intellectual force to be reckoned with.

Renée Poznanski Ben Gurion University of the Negev

The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-1945. Edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993. xii, 260 pp. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Despite the fact that close to two million Jews living under Soviet rule in 1940 were killed by the Germans, both Soviet and non-Soviet scholars have devoted relatively little attention to the systematic Nazi effort to exterminate Jews in oc- cupied Soviet territory. This neglect, which created a "blank spot" in our knowl- edge of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, stemmed from the straitjacketing of historians by Soviet authorities and the unavailability of source materials. Con- tributions to this volume, presented at a 1991 conference at Yeshiva University, are a valuable and long overdue effort to start filling in the blanks. This collection will surely encourage other scholars to mine the riches of the newly opened archives of the former Soviet Union. I can envision a proliferation of disserta- tions, articles and monographs about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union in all its horrifying and depressing dimensions, given the impetus provided by the stimu- lating essays in this volume.

The contributions to this anthology fall into three categories. First, several au- thors examine a variety of issues related to Soviet policies toward the Jews during the war (such as the evacuation of Jews from the path of the invading German army) and the treatment of the Holocaust in Soviet scholarship, literature, mass media and public memorials after 1945. Next, there are case studies of the actual destruction of Jewish communities in the Baltic, eastern Poland, Transnistria and elsewhere. Finally, several essays focus on source materials, including newly ac- cessible ones from Soviet archives as well as yizker-bikher or memorial books, in order to point the way to future researchers. Even though most of the contributors have not taken advantage of the opening of Soviet archives after the advent of glasnost' and perestroika, the essays are nonetheless rich in documentation and analysis (particularly those by Zvi Gitelman, Mordechai Altshuler, Jan Gross, and

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Dalia Ofer, which seem to me to break new ground), and revealing in what they tell about the destruction of Soviet Jewry.

One serious reservation about the collection is the failure of the editors to in- sist upon citations by several of the contributors. If one aim of the volume is to display the fruits of new research initiatives and encourage others to build upon the work presented here, then it behooves the authors and editors to furnish schol- ars who can work in the pertinent languages with references to the materials uti- lized in the collection's essays. Still, this volume is the best place to begin an English-language investigation of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and is a much-needed complement to existing secondary accounts.

Robert Weinberg Swarthmore College

Soviet Military Doctrine from Lenin to Gorbachev, 1915-1991. Edited by Willard C. Frank, Jr. and Philip S. Gillette. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. 448 pp. $59.95.

This volume originated in a conference held at Old Dominion University in May, 1989. By that time, Gorbachev had subjected what was still "Soviet" mili- tary policy to dramatic changes-unilateral force cuts, cuts in spending, a major new emphasis on defense, and a major deemphasis on the traditional Soviet view of inevitable conflict between the socialist and capitalist worlds. Since military doctrine was taken very seriously by the Soviets, as a body of theory which was . officially approved and directive in nature upon policy makers, the participants in this conference hoped to find in its study an understanding of its origins and de- velopment, and also the real meaning of the Gorbachev initiatives. To accomplish this, the editors brought together a diverse group of scholars with a variety of af- filiations-academics, diplomats, military officers, or various combinations of the above from universities, war colleges, think tanks, and government. All of the participants possess very impressive credentials.

As the authors amply demonstrate, Soviet military doctrine emerged as a sub- stantial body of theory unlike any comparable concept in the West. It was treated as consisting of two major aspects, the political and the military-technical. The former involved the strategic goals of the state and the latter, subordinate aspect concerned the military requirements to support those goals. At the beginning, one might have expected political doctrine, reflecting the revolutionary goals of the state, to assume an offensive character, _however the party leaders in the mood which led them to adopt the defensive "breathing space" of the NEP rejected the idea of initiating war to further the spread of socialism. Subsequently, supposedly, the dominant, political side of doctrine retained this defensive trait. However, of- fensive doctrine became "enshrined," as the editors note, on the military-technical side meaning that if war came, it would be pursued to final victory on enemy territory. The interplay between offense and defense and between the political and

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the military-technical sides of doctrine become the most interesting and central theme of this work.

Most of the fourteen chapters were composed before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In Part One, "Setting, 1990-1991," the first chapter, is one of two exceptions. In it, Robert Bathurst, in the knowledge that "Soviet" doctrine was now dead, posits likely elements of any future "Russian" doctrine and makes judi- cious comments on avoiding the kind of misperceptions which arose between the Soviet World and the West in the past. Bruce W. Menning follows with a defini- tion of Soviet doctrine and an introduction to the Gorbachev era changes.

Most of the history of doctrine is covered in Part Two, "Era of Marxism-Lenin- ism, 1915-1985," which opens with two excellent essays in intellectual history by Jacob Kipp. The first demonstrates how Lenin's reading of Clausewitz led him, with an assist from Hegel, to scrap the pacifism and anti-militarism of the pre-war Second International in favor of his own version of Marxism with its militarized party and state, and fully professional military, all geared for the "continuation of policy by other means" in pursuit of the world proletarian revolution. Next Kipp takes up the intellectual origins of Soviet military doctrine and narrows in on "op- erational art," a level of theory between strategy and tactics and a prominent and problematic concept which entails the means by which the Soviet military leader- ship sought to achieve victory over any enemy. As Kipp shows, the fertile theo- retical debate which gave rise to these doctrinal ideas came to an end with Stalin's terror and the purge of most of the debaters. Doctrine then presumably became more a matter of Stalin's whim. However, David Glantz in the next chapter man- ages to pursue a thread of doctrine through the Stalin years by examining how op- erational art was put into practice during World War II and how, following the ini- tial disasters of that conflict, it brought brilliant success and enshrined the doc- trine of the offensive even more thoroughly in Soviet theory. Harriet Fast Scott closes Part Two with a discussion of the nuclear age during which the Soviets demonstrated their determination to maintain the doctrine of the offensive, and at least parity with the West in both nuclear and, later, conventional arms.

The authors of Part Three, "Years of Change, 1985-1991," discuss the Gor- bachev era changes in various contexts. Raymond Garthoff, whose first book on Soviet doctrine was published forty years ago, leads off with an excellent account of Gorbachev's "new thinking" and its consequences for the political and military- technical sides of doctrine. Dale Herspring examines the response of the military leadership-generally favorable, he suggests, in hopes that perestroika could help bring Soviet technology up to a level with the West. Roy Allison discusses the meaning of the Gorbachevian category of "reasonable sufficiency" in defining a minimal defensive posture. Kent Lee closes with an examination of military sci- ence and, particularly, the way in which Soviet military journals reflected the shift from offense to defense.

Part Four, "Questions of Offense and Defense, 1989-1990," deals with the focal problem. Was Gorbachev's new defensive posture genuine or was it another varia- tion on the propaganda line dating back through Brezhnev's detente to Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence, neither of which had altered the offensive

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stance of doctrine? The case for the validity of the Gorbachev changes, most inter- estingly, is made by retired General Major Valentin V. Larionov who, as an asso- ciate of the Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, collaborated in working out the Gorbachev reforms. Larionov introduces four historical models of force .

positioning which move from offensive to defensive, and he proposes a related four-stage process by which the Warsaw Pact and NATO nations might mutually agree to assume completely defensive positions against each other. David Glantz and Graham Turbiville, examine these stages and consider the possibility that the final one may not be as defensive as it seems, or may be too easily convertible to an offensive position.

In Part Five, "The Impact of Technology, 1977-1991," Mary FitzGerald mounts an even stronger challenge to the Gorbachev position. Citing Soviet military au- thorities who took issue with it, she argues that nuclear and advanced conven- tional munitions (smart, laser-guided weapons, cruise missiles, and the like) have so blurred the distinction between offense and defense, that it is impossible to dis- tinguish between them. In her final chapter, the other of two written after the col- lapse of the Soviet Union, she concludes that as a result of their evaluation of Desert Storm the Soviet military actually returned to the pre-Gorbachev position, the offensive stance on the military-technical side of doctrine.

The reservations of Glantz, Turbiville, and FitzGerald lost much of their ur- gency with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the passing of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. However, their chapters retain utility both as records of what happened and as illustrations of the complexities involved in negotiating arms re- duction agreements.

As many of these authors cover the same ground in pursuit of their topics there is a good deal of repetition and, as often happens with collaborative works, the reader is left wishing for a more complete synthesis by a single author. In this case, such a synthesis might resolve at least one apparent contradiction. Lari- onov, and others, attest that the initial Soviet military disaster following Hitler's invasion owed to the Red Army's being in offensive positions with inadequately prepared defensive lines to their rear, all as a result of the doctrinal emphasis on offense. Glantz and Turbiville, however, refer to a defensive Soviet stance in June 1941, and Glantz attributes the disasters to last-ditch efforts to change structure. This might have some bearing on the controversy which seems to be emerging in connection with Victor Suvorov's charge that Stalin was planning his own offen- sive to the west. If doctrine was at this time to be sought primarily in Stalin's head, one might question whether he had not opted for the offensive on the politi- cal side of doctrine, if, indeed, he thought in those terms. His deal with Hitler, and his subsequent actions against Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, and Romania, not to mention his post-war advances in Eastern Europe, would certainly not con- tradict such an hypothesis.

Our hypothetical author might also expand on comments by Garthoff, Her- spring, Allison, and Larionov concerning the tremendous economic burdens pur- suit of offensive military doctrine created for the Soviet Union. The story could then end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and show how military doctrine,

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and the politics guided by it, contributed to that collapse. As archives open this should become more feasible. Meanwhile, the editors have succeeded in their hope to provide an historical account of Soviet doctrine and a starting point for the fu- ture study of a new Russian doctrine.

John D. Walz California State University, Hayward

Thinking Theoretically About Soviet Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR. Edited by Alexander J. Motyl. New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1992. 284 pp. $45.00.

There is a definite risk in publishing a book on contemporary affairs in a time of change, and the title of this book stands as another monument to the rapid course of events in Eastern Europe in the last decade. The Soviet Union has passed into history, and the authors find their analysis, their references to "recent events," and their predictions about what Crawford Young here calls "the ren- dezvous with uncertainty" (p. 92), frozen in time for the reader to contemplate. Who among these authors really anticipated the breakup of the Soviet Union?

Included in this work are essays by Donald L. Horowitz, John A. Armstrong, Anthony D. Smith, M. Crawford Young, Paul R. Brass, David D. Laitin, Roger Petersen, John W. Slocum, Charles F. Furtado Jr., Michael Hechhter, S. N. Eisenstadt, Kenneth Minogue, Beryl Williams, and Ernest Gellner. The editor of the volume, Alexander Motyl, hastens to point out at the beginning that the work does not pretend to be a comprehensive study of the nationalities of the former Soviet Union, it "is not an up to-date analysis" of Gorbachev's policies, and it "is not a historical account" of the nationalities of the former Soviet Union. It is rather "an exercise in creative thinking" (p. 1). One might suggest that it repre- sents and effort at sblizhenie between Soviet nationality studies and comparative ethnic studies in the rest of the world with the hope of eventual sliianie of the two areas into a happy marriage of theory and practice.

Speculating as to why this marriage had not occurred earlier, Motyl suggests on the one hand that western specialists in ethnic studies required that their "state not be totalitarian," and on the other that among Soviet specialists those interested in the nationalities were "severely disadvantaged" by the situation "in the competi- . tion for jobs and grants." (pp. 257-58) Both those conditions would now seem to have changed for the better, and the literature is growing rapidly.

The book should be interesting and useful for all who are interested in the ethnic problems of Eastern Europe. The variety of essays, ranging from abstract theoriz- ing, through case studies, to sarcastic commentary, should stimulate the reaction that the editor seems to be hoping for. The authors do not all agree with each other. Language seems more important to some, less so to others. One author de- clares as a matter of fact, "Since Soviet politics could scarcely be understood in the terms applicable to the Western democracies...." (p. 10), while another argues, "These mutations in the United States as multi-cultural polity closely mirror alter-

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ations in the Soviet communal landscape" (p. 70). There are a number of points at which a reader may cavil. On page 17, for example, the author seems to suggest that Kazakhstan borders on Afghanistan. On page 175, the alteration, not "aboli- tion," of Article Six of the Soviet Constitution in April (not January) 1990, under pressure not from the Congress of People's Deputies but from the Lithuanian ex- ample, was certainly not "the most important achievement in democratization," in that Gorbachev ignored the change in practice. Far more important, as several au- thors here point out, was the holding of elections regardless of what Article Six provided.

The index to the volume, one should also note, is very incomplete. As an invet- erate user of indexes in reading such volumes, I looked first to find references to Hegel, and there were none, although his name appears several times in the text. I was also surprised to find Lithuania absent from the index, but the Lithuanians, too, appear in the text.

Nationality is such a complex part of life that specialists in different dis- ciplines can easily disagree on what they are observing. Some look at nationalism and emphasize what drives peoples apart; others theorize about what binds the group together. Some dismiss nationalism as an irrationality based on something like the affective geodemographic Potato Principle (p. 251) or as opportunistic ra- tional calculation. Yet, as one author warns, "group calculations of costs and ben- efits may make the situation more murky than it may seem" (p. 17).

Ultimately one must also remember that no nationality is a monolithic unit. No matter how established its "boundary" may appear to an outsider, each has its own internal political prism with a variety of views. In the heyday of Stalinism and even "stagnation," Socialist Realism hid the realities of ethnic groups in the So- viet Union; observers should not err in the same way now by uncritically accept- ing other generalizations made from outside and often hostile sources.

Interethnic relations in "Eurasia" have undergone such rapid change that the very character of some nationalities has changed. Most of the essays make the point that the nationalities question in the former Soviet Union was not uniform throughout the entire state. Succeeding generations in a given nationality, more- over, have different priorities than their parents or grandparents did, and in the chaos of the early 1990s even the political elites have changed in many places. Therefore the theories and approaches presented in this collection may be very appropriate for capturing one moment but outdated when confronting another. This should make the volume all the more useful to the people who want such a "how-to" book with which to get started.

Alfred Erich Senn University of Wisconsin, Madison

Kristian Gerner and Stefan Hedlund. The Baltic States and the End of the Soviet Empire. London: Routledge, 1993. x, 211 pp. $62.50.

In The Baltic States and the End of the Soviet Empire, Kristian Gerner and Ste- fan Hedlund offer an account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, focusing largely

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on the Baltic independence movements, but also relaying a sense of the economic, ecological, and political decay of the Soviet regime. Although the authors set forth to provide a game-theory account of bargaining behavior, beyond using the language of game theory (chicken race, strategies of binding), there is little in the way of game theory utilized in the book. The authors do, however, achieve their goal of telling "a good story."

There are several reasons why Gerner and Hedlund are unsuccessful in their of application of game theory. According to James Morrow, game theory is "a theory of interdependent decisions--when the decisions of two or more individuals jointly determine the outcome of a situation" (Game Theory, 1994 :1). Individuals' choices are shaped or constrained by their social settings, and it is the task of game theory to formalize those settings and examine their effects on the individ- ual decisions. To do so, one must "specify what choices the players face, how those choices lead to outcomes, and how the actors evaluate those outcomes" (Morrow: 112). While Gerner and Hedlund provide discussion of the players and their preferences (independence for the Baltic states and preservation of the Union for Moscow), there is not an adequate discussion of strategies or payoffs. Nor do they provide a ranking of outcomes by the players. Actors bargain over outcomes. They disagree about which outcome is best, but there is a set of outcomes that both sides are willing to accept. Given the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is difficult to talk of a game of bargaining in which the outcome is the destruction of one of the players. This was not an outcome both sides were willing to accept. Although the authors only briefly discussed the Soviet blockade of Lithuania in 1990, the Soviet offer to lift the blockade in exchange for a freezing of the Lithuanian par- liament's declaration of independence could have been analyzed in terms of strate- gic bargaining.

Gerner and Hedlund do provide an informed exposition of the rise of indepen- dence movements in the Baltic states. Particularly useful is their comparative ap- proach to these three movements. The authors stress the importance of economic reform in Estonia as a catalyst for political mobilization. They demonstrate how in Latvia and Lithuania economic reform played a less important role, while in all three cases ecological issues contributed to the process of political mobilization.

The authors adopt a rather narrow definition of ethnic nationalism, the idea that a people defined according to linguistic criteria should have their own national state. This equating of national identity with language obscures a more complex relationship between national identity and ethnicity, language and history. The decisions that players take are constrained by social settings. The authors need a more detailed formulation of how ethnic nationalism acts as a social setting and constrains the choices made by the players. Despite the problems in definition and formulation, the authors do draw our attention to the important role that ethnic nationalism played in forming a point of reference and departure for the political struggles against Moscow. They explain how differences in perception, in particu- lar the Baltic notion of the interwar years symbolizing the fulfillment of self-de- termination contrasting with the Soviet stress on continuity from 1918-19 to

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1989, contributed to the political struggle between the Baltic states and Gor- bachev's Soviet Union.

Had Gerner and Hedlund been able to analyze communications between the lead- ers in the Baltic states and Moscow and had they presented a model of strategies, payoffs, and outcomes, they may have provided a more convincing game-theoreti- cal account of the bargaining that took place. The authors provide a framework that suggests the book will be about individual players with changing strategies. In the end, they just provide an analysis of events.

Ellen J. Gordon University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point

Muslims in Central Asia: Expressions of Identity and Change. Edited by Jo-Ann Gross. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. 224 pp. $18.95/$39.95.

Russia and China have shared a human frontier that is ethnically neither Rus- sian nor Chinese longer than they have shared anything else. The peoples who constitute this frontier on what was the Russian/Soviet side of it are now largely free to defme themselves in a way that has not been possible since the medieval period. They are no longer to be counted as captive nations, though their captivity for the better part of this century surely plays a role in their present. The interest- ing collection of essays under review here contributes to a necessary fresh start on our understanding of the Muslims of Central Asia now that they have escaped the tidy confines of the Soviet boxes with which Western scholars became a bit too comfortable. Editor Gross is certainly correct to note in a Postscript written after the eclipse of Soviet power that "it should now be possible to more correctly con- ceive of [Central Asia] within the wider historical and cultural map of the Eastern Islamic world of Iran, China and Northern India." (p. 203)

Gross introduces the volume with an anthropologically freighted discussion of the several possible approaches to the problem of "identity formation" which might be summarized in the question, "Who do they think they are, and why do they think it?" The essays that work at that question are arranged in three sections: The Shaping and Reshaping of Identity, Islam as a Source of Identity, and Dis- course as a Cultural Expression of Identity. The very broad scope of the volume ranges from Beatrice Forbes Manz's essay on Chaghat<3y self-consciousness to Christopher Murphy's piece on the early modem Uzbek novelist and intellectual . Abdullah Qadiriy. There is also the necessary examination of the Jadid movement, in this case provided by Edward J. Lazzerini. A glossary and a general bibliogra- phy help to make the book accessible to readers who are not Central Asian spe- cialists.

To tease a generalization from a book that does not really pretend one, it might be said that as the authentic voice of Central Asian Turkic Islam and the people who identify with it begins to speak it will not be understood without appreciating the deep complexity from which it issues.

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Taken as a whole the essays succeed well in the modest goal of suggesting, as the editor notes on page 5, "insights as to the directions for research on identity formation in Central Asian studies." One suspects that an alternative reading of this statement, that students of Central Asia might be experiencing an identity crisis of their own, though unintended, may also be true. In any case, historians of Russia will profit from working through the book. The historical intimacy of Rus- sia with Asia is only emphasized by the current process of redefinition on the pe- riphery called into being by the collapse of the center.

G. L Penrose Hope College

Russia's Muslim Frontiers-New Directions in Cross-Cultural Analysis. Edited by Dale F. Eickelman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 224 pp. $29.95 cloth; $12.95 paper.

This collection of essays introduced by Dale Eickelman is the result of the joint efforts of six Soviet and five U.S. scholars who addressed questions of cross-cul- tural analysis during two interdisciplinary workshops held in 1990 (USSR) and 1991 (U.S.). D. F. Eickelman's introductory essay ("The Other 'Orientalist' Cri- sis") and N. Kh. Masud's conclusion ("The Limits of 'Expert' Knowledge"), in addi- tion to the chapters by D. B. Edwards ("The Poetics of Political Dissent in Afghanistan"), G. R. Garthwaite ("Tribes and Nationalism--Bakhtiari and Kurds"), and R. Kurin ("Islamization in Pakistan: The Sayyid and the Dancer") are the only contributions that justify the claim this volume makes to offering "new directions in cross-cultural analysis."

Each of the above scholars' essays exhibits sensitivity to the grounds of mean- ing and identity rooted in "culture" and suggests new epistemologies for the cul- tural accommodations of change, away from historical and cultural totalization. D. Edwards reaches out for poetry as a repository of the Afghan people's values and beliefs and endows it with a place of centrality for understanding the roots of pop- ular attitudes toward politics and revolution. Such an approach, away from the tra- ditional emphasis on political and economic institutions, with its clear focus on a totalizing cultural performance such as poetry is, indeed, refreshing. It is helpful not only for identifying the importance of poetry as a form of resistance, but also for pointing to the centrality of poetry in giving expression to the perception of identity of the Central Asian Muslims.

G. Garthwaite's essay reiterates the constructedness and imagined nature of identities by focusing on a discussion of tribal and national identity with reference to the Bakhtiari and the Kurds. He challenges the validity of a concept such as "na- tional minorities" as analytical category, pointing to its reductionist quality; he also identifies the pitfalls of confusing the concepts of tribe and ethnicity. Garth- waite identifies and discusses the tension that existed between the imperatives of "absolute moral unity" and the realities of the layered, multiple identities of the Bakhtiari; in doing so, he underlines the importance of context (historical, cul-

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tural, social) for understanding the roots of the adaptability of tribal structures and the malleability of identity boundaries in Central Asian societies.

R. Kurin not only underlines the importance of cultural diversity that is charac- teristic of Islam within the unity of faith, but also points to the relevance of "mul- tiple discourses," a heteroglossia of sorts within each cultural context, when he focuses on the level of personal experience for tracing how Islamization in Pak- istan affected the "notions of self, other and society" in the case of the sayyid and the dancer.

Vbile R. W. Cottam and G. Korniyenko's essays are representative of the clas- sic tradition of "orientalist" discourse that viewed the "Orient" as the arena in which the European game of contest unfolded, V. Korgun's essay illustrates clearly some of the perplexities of dichotomizing, reductionist, primordialist analyses that perpetuate cultural stereotypes in the mold of the typical Eastern ruler (Taraki) "wit? a predisposition to a sort of sybaritism" who is contrasted to the Western educated leader (Amin)--an "energetic, sly, pragmatic man without the slightest tract of Eastern sybaritism" (p. 111). ,

Its descriptive nature notwithstanding, M. B. Olcott's essay illustrates further the "Orientalist" stereotyping, for it portrays a Central Asian elite that "ruled like feudal overlords, free to steal and spend as they wished, once they had dispatched the required tribute to Moscow" (p. 51). Startling, however, is Olcott's assertion that the replacement of Tsarist power with Soviet "left Central Asians with little opportunity to figure out who they are and how they would like to live" (p. 49). Not only does such a statement ignore the existence, let alone complexity, of an identity discourse that preceded the Soviet regime, but it renders meaningless Muslim National Communism in Central Asia, rooted as it was in the cultural and political context that preceded the first two decades of Soviet rule.

A. V. Malashenko's essay points to the longevity of the identity discourse and to the resilience of the religious marker of identity among the Muslims of the So- viet state when it views contemporary Islamic revival as a continuation of the processes interrupted in the 1920s.

A. Abduvakhitov's essay is based on an intimate knowledge of the Uzbek scene. Particularly useful are Abduvakhitov's discussions of parallel, popular Is- lam and official Islam, which, he argues, has been coopted by secular politicians. The most telling testimony of this cooptation is, in his opinion, what he calls the "tribalization" of official Islam, evident in the emergence of the independent Kazakh and Tajik Muftiats (Religious Boards) and the fragmentation of the old Muftiat that served the needs of all Central Asians.

Accompanied by an index but lacking a bibliography, this book not only pre- sents to the reader new directions of analysis but also underlines the differences between the new and the old approaches, both of which are to be found here. Con- sequently, it is hoped that this volume will become a catalyst to new paths of scholarship on Central Asia.

Azade-Ayse Rorlich University of Southern California

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Riaz M. Khan. Untying the Afghan Knot: Negotiating Soviet Withdrawal. Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 1991. xi, 402 pp. $49.95.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, 1979, and the subsequent military involvement, exemplified the Soviet Union in transition. This episode in international affairs became a focal point in US-Soviet relations, with American responses ranging from the immediate 1980 embargo and Olympic boycott, to the long-term arming of the Afghan rebel forces. It also became a symbol in Soviet domestic politics. As power shifted in the Kremlin from the traditional hardliners of the Brezhnev generation to the Gorbachev reformers, the issue of Soviet involvement in an endless military quagmire began to divide the leadership and the nation. Riaz Khan's detailed and lucid study brings to life yet another im- portant dimension of the Afghan crisis: the importance of international organiza- tions in setting up a framework in which the ultimate withdrawal could take place. He presents several reasons for this approach, the most important of which is that the negotiation process itself had a direct bearing on the conflict's participants. For example, Gorbachev's planned exit from the crisis was facilitated by the United Nations framework finalized in 1988. (pp. 4-5)

In his analysis, the author focuses on the intricate negotiations that led to the April 1988 Geneva Accords. From the beginning, the discussions monitored and directed by the United Nations encountered numerous problems and conflicts. Among them were the inability for the principal actors to agree on common goals, treaty wordings, and the format for direct and indirect talks. The book's strength lies in the presentation of these multi-level discussions. The reader is taken through the series of conferences and sessions that often raised more questions than they settled. One gets to know the major players, with special attention to Diego Cordovez of the UN and Yaqub Khan of Pakistan. Riaz Khan's experience in diplomatic affairs and personal contact with both the negotiations and the other actors in the drama translate into a well-documented and well-crafted analysis of the Afghan crisis.

The book might be disappointing for readers who expect to read about the Soviet perspective. Although the Soviet leadership and diplomats play key roles in the Geneva Accords, they are just one group of participants. Indeed, the central diplomatic relationship described in the book is that between Pakistan and Afghanistan as structured under the United Nations' framework. There is minimal discussion of the Soviet domestic quarrel over the involvement in Afghanistan beyond the necessary, historical references. Even further marginalized is the role of the United States. This is not to imply that Riaz Khan ignores the importance of the two superpowers, one of which was the military occupier of Afghanistan. Rather, the book is intended to stress the negotiations themselves, which were primarily between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Riaz Khan's decision to focus on the Afghan-Pakistan relationship is important because it places the Afghan crisis in a regional perspective, not in the traditional "superpower rivalry" framework. Con- sequently, the perspectives and positions of other interested parties are given

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equal footing. This includes the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and, of course, the United Nations.

Ultimately, one can ask the question: how influential were the negotiations in the Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan? In the latter chapters, Riaz Khan refers to the internal problems and changes in the Soviet Union brought about by Gorbachev's reformist campaign. By the mid-1980s, telltale signs of trouble were already evident in the Soviet Union. Officials openly questioned the reason for continuing troop involvement in Afghanistan. Even public opinion suggested that the war was no longer popular. The need to stem the material, human, and most importantly, financial drain of the Afghan War prompted the Soviet government to seriously consider participating in the negotiations that led to the Geneva Accords. Riaz Khan correctly points out that had the negotiations not proceeded for some time prior to the Soviet decision to withdraw, the process could have taken much longer. As it stood, Soviet troops were able to leave before the proposed deadline.

This last point reinforces the importance of understanding the complex negotiations that took place prior to the 1988 Accord. They underscore the role that other interested parties played in the conflict's resolution and the problems inherent in diplomacy between nations that, in some cases, did not even recognize the legitimacy of the other actors. Most importantly, the Afghan negotiations, represented a bold step in the evolution of international diplomacy. The United Nations set up a framework for negotiations that included regular sessions, even if just to review previous decisions and to maintain contact. Riaz Khan writes that, "The process thus highlighted, first, the value of innovative ideas and proposals in providing underpinnings for progress and success, and, second, the signifi- cance of the mediator's role, which is often depreciated in comparison to the piv- otal influence that political circumstances bring to bear on any negotiations" (p. 291). In light of current international crises, the case of the Geneva Accords might serve as a framework for future negotiations.

Roger Kangas The University of Mississippi

Central Asia and the Caucasus After the Soviet Union: Domestic and International Dynamics. Edited by Mohiaddin Mesbahi. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. 319 pp. + index. $49.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.

This book is an ambitious undertaking. Not only is the regional coverage quite broad, but topical considerations range from the role of Islam and ethnicity, to geopolitics and external relations with other regions. Chapters on each of the emerging states of former Soviet Central Asia are also included, although one should not be misled by the title and expect to discover any detailed treatment of either Georgia or Arnenia. The work is organized into four major parts, with most

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of the contributions being originally presented in March 1992 at a conference in Tehran, Iran, with Western, Russian and Central Asian scholars participating.

Mohiaddin Mesbahi has done a masterful job weaving the disparate foci and perspectives of the authors into a cohesive whole; yet this volume suffers from a shortcoming virtually endemic to works of similar character. the quality of contri- butions ebbs and flows considerably, with some chapters having the impact of a tour de force, while others offer little that is worthwhile, even for those just dis- covering the region.

In general, the majority of chapters written by Russian and Central Asian scholars suffer from slim footnoting, problems of style, and occasional misstate- ments of fact. A segment of Aziz Niyazov's discussion of Tajikistan, for example, is packed full of detailed statistical data (pp. 169-72), without a single citation provided. There are rare slips by Western contributors as well, as when Marie Ben- nigsen Broxup identifies Brezhnev as the Soviet leader who replaced Kunaev as First Party Secretary in Kazakhstan (it was Gorbachev), and Martha Brill Olcott's assertion that Kazakhs are the majority group in only eight of Kazakhstan's oblasts (the figure is actually nine, according to data from January 1992).

Part 1, "Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus: Ethnicity and Islam," is com- posed of three essays examining the complex relationship of religious identity and ethnic identification. This section contains two of the book's high points in an intriguing chapter by Eden Naby ("The Emerging Central Asia: Ethnic and Re- ligious Factions") and M. Nazif Shahrani's thought-provoking piece on the im- pact of the Soviet era ("Muslim Central Asia: Soviet Development Legacies and Future Challenges"). Naby's observations on the differing perspectives between rural and urban residents in Tajikistan, and the role such differences may play in ethnic politics, should be required reading for all students of the region.

Shahrani takes the interesting, if unpopular position that Soviet developmen- tal policy in Central Asia saw "a considerable degree of success economically, po- litically, and culturally." Shahrani's argument is trenchant and convincing; but one must take issue with his statement that "the former Soviet Central Asian Mus- lims did not play any significant part in the demise of the Communist regime in Moscow...." (p. 57). The position may be taken (and indeed is, in a later chapter by Martha Brill Olcott), that the fatal cracks in the Soviet edifice emerged in December 1986, when Kazakh demonstrators in Alma-Ata violently protested the replacement of the republic's First Party Secretary.

Parts 2 and 3 are regionally focused, dealing with "new Muslim states" in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The quality of work here is quite uneven. Among the most disappointing contributions is Zahid I. blunavvarov's chapter on Uzbek- istan. At points, the discussion reads like a promotional brochure for the new na- tion, and several important subjects are either glossed over or completely omitted. For example, nowhere does the author address the enormous environmental diffi- culties facing Uzbekistan, and the demographic challenges caused by high rates of natural increase over the last several decades are barely mentioned. Munavvarov does offer the proposition that Uzbekistan is considering "exporting labor" to neighboring states (138), but does not specifically identify any potential takers.

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One is left to mull over which countries in the region might be willing to absorb a significant number of Gastarbeiter (Turkey, Iran, China, Russia[!]?). Munavvarov carefully skirts the issue of the authoritarian character of the current regime, claim- ing instead that "a multiparty system is entering the republic's political l;fe" (p. 137), and completely ignores the crushing of the most prominent opposition group Birlik and the subsequent flight of its leadership from Uzbekistan.

The final section, entitled "Russia and the Former Soviet South: The New Geopolitics," holds four excellent chapters which serve to place Central Asia in global context. Milan L. Hauner begins the discussion by confronting the com- plex and arcane political geography of the region. His writing on this subject is .

possibly the best yet to appear in the wake of Soviet disintegration, although he may go too far in asserting that "Kazakhstan must be considered the decisive lit- mus test for the survival of the new Eurasian commonwealth" (p. 217). The remaining three articles are all well-done, with Mohiaddin Mesbahi's analysis of Russia's foreign policy towards her former Central Asian colonies bordering on brilliant. One closes the book trusting he has forwarded copies to various U.S. government agencies.

In spite of its flaws, Central Asia and the Caucasus After the Soviet Union: Domestic and International Dynamics is a welcome addition to the field of Central Asian Studies. It will be most useful as an introduction to the region for students in political science, international affairs, and geography, and should be part of any collection focused on that part of the world Sir Halford J. MacKinder labeled "the geographical pivot of history." ... : .

Reuel R. Hanks Kennesaw State College

William F. Nimmo. Japan and Russia: A Reevaluation in the Post-Soviet Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. xxx, 207 pp. $55.00.

William Nimmo's first book that examined the problem of Japanese prisoners- of-war in the Soviet Union, Behind a Curtain of Silence ( 1988), was a good mono- graph based on a vast array of primary sources and archival materials. In the new book under review, Nimmo tackles a broader subject of Russo-Japanese relations, venturing out of his specialized period: Japan under American occupation. Unfor- tunately, this work does not come near to the quality of his previous study.

The book is divided into two parts: the first two chapters provide historical background, while the remaining four chapters follow the chronological develop- ment of Russo/Soviet-Japanese relations since Gorbachev's accession to power in 1985. The subtitle is misleading, therefore, since the Gorbachev period is given equal space as the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ironically, I found the first two chapters that provide background most useful. Especially the section dealing with the SCAP's (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) attitude to- ward Soviet policy immediately after the end of World War II provides interesting

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information that is derived from hitherto unused materials from the MacArthur Archives.

In contrast, the author's treatment of Russo-Japanese relations since 1985 is disappointing. The four chapters that constitute the central focus of this study look like a brief description of chronology hastily put together mostly from a few newspapers (mostly English-language newspapers in Japan) without any coherent organizational and analytical scheme. There is no serious analysis on such crucial issues as the linkage between foreign and domestic policies either in Russia or in Japan, the importance of exogenous factors, and the significance of regional poli- tics. A large body of secondary literature, for instance, works by Kimura Hiroshi, Wada Haruki, Konstantin Sarkisov, Georgii Kunadze, Vladimir Ivanov, Mikhail Nosov, Aleksei Bogaturov, Aleksei Zagorskii, Peter Berton, and this reviewer are completely ignored. Gilbert Rozman's book is mentioned, but the vast array of sources given by Rozman remains untapped by the author.

It is difficult to learn from this study whether there has been any change in So- viet/Russia or Japanese policy, and if there was, precisely when and why this change occurred. For instance, there is no analysis as to why the Japanese gov- ernment adopted the policy of "expanded equilibrium" (kakudai kinko). What is the relationship between "expanded equilibrium" and "inseparability of politics and economics" (seikei fukabun)? In order to understand these questions, one must analyze the change in the Japanese government's approach to the process of pere- stroika and the divergence between its approach and that of the rest of its allies. The significance of Nakasone's trip to Moscow in 1988 and that of Abe in 1990 cannot be fully understood without the context in which these trips took place. These trips that had enormous importance in changing the momentum of Soviet- Japanese relations are not qualitatively separated from numerous other insignifi- cant events that are stacked up in Nimmo's description of events. Kanemaru Shin's complete change of opinion on Japan's policy toward Russia as well as Valentin Fedorov's turnaround in his policy toward the Northern Territories at least require an explanation. These changes must be examined in the context of the linkage be- tween domestic politics and foreign policy. Nimmo asserts that the United States government has steadfastly backed the Japanese position on the Northern Territo- ries. That is true, but there has been a subtle change in the role of the territorial dispute in U.S. policy since the latter part of the Bush administration. The North- ern Territories dispute no longer serves as an excuse to prevent rapprochement be- tween Russia and Japan, as was the primary goal of the United States during the Cold War, but rather it is now perceived by the United States government as an impediment to achieve a grand reconciliation between Russia and the Western al- lies. This partially explained the reason why the Japanese government adopted the policy of "expanded equilibrium." All these important dimensions are lacking in Nimmo's superficial description of chronology.

Moreover, the text is marred by various careless mistakes. Nishioka Takeo is identified as Takeoka Nishio (p. 83), Yokomichi Takahiro as Yokomichi Masahiro (p. 134), and Tereshko as Tereskho twice in the text (p. 134) and in the index. Transliteration is not consistent: we see both Rabochaya Tribuna and

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Izvestiia; they should be either Rabochaia Tribuna and Izvestiia or Rabochaya Tri- buna and Izvestiya. Moreover, Kuznetsov is spelled Kouznetsov. More serious are egregious factual errors. When Japan announced its $2.5 billion aid program in October 1991, it did not attach any political demands, as is claimed by Nimmo. In fact, this was an important departure from Japan's traditional policy of insepara- bility of politics and economics. It is doubtful that Burblulis, who was the staunch supporter of the Kunadze line, voted with Rutskoi and Grachev against Yeltsin's trip to Tokyo at the crucial September 9 Security Council meeting. The source of this information is not given.

This hastily put together book adds little to our understanding of this ex- tremely important subject.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa University of California, Santa Barbara

Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott. Russia and the New States of Eurasia. The Poli- tics of Upheaval. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xi, 437 pp. $19.95 paper.

This book may be the first and last of its kind: an accessible introduction to domestic and foreign affairs in the new states of Eurasia. With Sovietology disin- tegrating around them, Dawisha and Parrott resisted the move toward country stud- ies and produced instead a thematic survey of politics on the territory of the former USSR. It is, on several counts, a considerable achievement. A glance at the table of contents suggests a work divided into sections on comparative and interna- tional politics. The text reveals something quite different: an imaginative blend of intrastate and interstate concerns throughout. The authors are also intent on re- vealing the underlying structures that condition political behavior. The early chapters set out convincingly the historical, ethnic, religious, political, cultural, and economic matrix within which new states and societies are developing. This approach lengthens considerably the shelf life of the book, which was completed just before the events of early October 1993.

Producing a broad and immediate survey of politics in the territories of the for- mer USSR meant that the authors relied almost exclusively on secondary literature in their research. It is testimony to the energy of post-Sovietology that a rich body of work on the newly independent states was ready to be mined. The decision to tackle their subject thematically meant that the authors adopted a geographical approach within chapters. Each chapter begins with a short survey and then tours the successor states, with stops in Russia, the Western NIS (Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic, and Moldova), and the Southern NIS (Caucasus and Central Asia). In- evitably, a few states, like Moldova, get whistle stops.

Until the final chapter, the authors are reluctant to push conclusions on the reader. The weight of the evidence, however, illustrates effectively several themes. The first is the intellectual confusion of the ruling elites, who, in most cases, are willing to change their stripes if only they knew what costume was the order of the

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day. For them, everything is in flux, from expert advice to economic performance to social movements. The second thread that runs through the book is the impor- tance of Russians beyond Russia. The permutations here are many, and most are well known. But Dawisha and Parrott are particularly effective at moving beyond the numbers and locating the Russians strategically. In Belarus, for example, eight of nine deputy ministers of defense were Russians in mid-1992. Finally, de- cision-making in foreign policy seems to differ markedly between Russia and the remaining states. A combination of high stakes and relatively open politics has made the game far more intricate in Russia than in the surrounding states.

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In a concluding chapter, the authors compare the demise of the USSR with other cases of imperial collapse. They emerge from this exercise with a measure of op- timism about Eurasia's future. To be sure, some elements of the transition are dis- turbing : its speed, its potential military consequences, and its socio-economic starting point. But the new states of Eurasia enjoy certain advantages in this his- torical moment. The collapse "transpired during a period of international amity without precedent..."; "potential scavenger states," like Iran and China, have been reluctant to "pull components of the disintegrating empire into their own.. .orbit"; the memory of Stalinism guards, to some extent, against a rebirth of au- thoritarianism ; and so forth. It is strangely reassuring to be reminded that things could be worse.

Russia and the New States of Eurasia is in many respects an ideal textbook for a course on post-Soviet politics. Its reach is broad, its writing is lucid and lively, and its more than 40 pages of appendices present chronology, leadership changes, and census data in easily digestable form. With this first product from their Rus- sian Littoral Project, Dawisha and Parrott have set a very high standard indeed.

Eugene Huskey Stetson University

Troubled Friendships: Moscow's Third World Ventures. Edited by Margot Light. London and New York: British Academic Press, in association with the Royal In- stitute of International Affairs, London [distributed in the United States by St. Martin's Press], 1993. viii, 225 pp. $59.50.

The expansion of Soviet interest and involvement in the Third World during the period 1955-1985 was an issue that exercised the concern of Washington and the growing interest of both scholarly and policy analysts. Moreover, the rise of self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist regimes throughout the developing world and their close ties with Moscow were presented by Soviet President Brezhnev as evi- dence of the "changing international correlation of forces" that was supposedly a harbinger of the eventual global victory of Marxism-Leninism and the USSR in the global confrontation with the capitalist United States. However, as many ana- lysts have noted, the rise of Marxist-Leninist states throughout the Third World brought Moscow probably far more problems than it did benefits. By the early 1980s many of Moscow's Third-World friends, in particular, those with Marxist-

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Leninist regimes found themselves under attack from domestic and foreign oppo- nents. The result was an escalating demand for support from their mentors in Moscow.

Troubled Friendships, edited by Margot Light, traces the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy innovations of relationships between the USSR and six especially important Third-World countries, all of which had signed treaties of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union. Four of these countries-An- gola, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Vietnam-felI into the category of revolutionary Marx- ist-Leninist states aspiring to emulate the USSR in creating socialist societies, while the other two, India and Syria, limited their relationships with the Soviets to the level of state-to-state contacts.

The contributors to this volume provide overviews of Soviet policy toward the six countries during the Brezhnev period before examining the impact that Gor- bachev's policy reforms had on the special relationships with the USSR. Editor Margot Light begins with a general overview of the evolution of Soviet policy toward the Third World, in which she notes the importance of growing demands of the USSR in influencing the policy reassessments that occurred under Gorbachev. In the case studies that follow, other contributors pick up many of her points. Pe- ter J. S. Duncan outlines the uniqueness of the Soviet relationship with India--one based far more on mutuality of interest than was the case in the other relation- ships. As Duncan notes, the Soviets were well aware of the fact that for them this relationship "was much more fruitful than those which the Kremlin suffered with revolutionary regimes such as Mengistu's Ethiopia or Asad's Syria" (p. 47).

As Igor Belikov argues, the escalating costs of support for Angola played an important role in the Soviet exodus from that country in 1991. Victor Funnell traces the shifts in Soviet policy toward Vietnam, while Robert G. Patman docu- ments the dramatic changes in Soviet policy in Ethiopia which resulted in a with- drawal of support for the Marxist regime of Col. Mengistu. Efraim Karsh discusses the intricacies of the Soviet-Syrian relationship and the factors that resulted in a gradual reduction of Soviet support for Iraq in the late 1980s. In the final case study Peter Shearman concludes that, with the end of the Cold War, the ideological facts that tied Moscow to Cuba eroded, "resulting in a far less salient position for Castro's regime in the hierarchy of Soviet foreign policy interests" (p. 187).

As the authors of these case studies demonstrate, the Soviet Union exercised little political control over its friends-in fact, it often found itself virtually forced to support its clients on policies that it did not favor. Moreover, in most cases bilateral economic activity outside the military areas was low, and Soviet arms sales were not confined to states that had signed friendship treaties. Despite these factors, both partners in these relationships envisioned long-term benefits - that they would attain through long-term agreements.

Troubled Friendships is a well-written and carefully argued set of case studies that demonstrate the dramatic effect of "new thinking" in Soviet foreign and secu- rity policy on relationships with developing countries even prior to the Gulf War of 1990-91 and to the collapse of the Soviet state. One might question, however, the rather cavalier projection about the likely reemergence of any special relation-

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ships between Russia and these former Soviet allies. The extension of treaty commitments in 1993 between Russian and Cuba, for example, questions the edi- tor's conclusion that "Russian antipathy to socialism rules out friendly relations with Vietnam or Cuba unless they undergo radical domestic change" (p. 210). However, this is but a minor quibble about an otherwise perceptive volume that traces the demise of Soviet relations with a key set of its Third-World allies.

Roger E. Kanet University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Richard Sakwa. Russian Politics and Society. London: Routledge, 1993. 506 pp. $18.95.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the theories and models that guided analysis of the old order and its dynamics have been largely abandoned. Some scholars are searching for new approaches, while others have simply accepted the present the- oretical rootlessness of the subfield and have fallen back upon the journalistic mode of analysis that was widely practiced in sovietology. Russian Politics and Society, intended as a comprehensive and "accessible" introductory text, is an il- lustration of the effect of the loss of paradigm upon recent scholarship. Although filled with insights and fascinating accounts of recent events, the book ultimately fails to provide consistent explanations for post-communist political and social transformation or compelling assessments of contemporary Russian politics. In- stead of developed and well-supported arguments, the reader is bombarded with the typical truisms and cliches: the Soviet system collapsed because it was fundamen- tally flawed; civil society is nascent but weak; democracy, while strengthening, is fragile; and the Yeltsin government has done what it had to do in order to preserve "democracy" and dismantle state socialism.

To his credit, the author, who crafted a fine, thoughtful account of the pere- stroika period (Gorbachev and His Reforms, 1991 ), appears to be fully aware of the need to integrate the study of the former Soviet Union into the mainstream of comparative politics: he attempts to construct a theoretically informed analysis and to apply central social science concepts upon the seeming chaos of the last four years. However, he refrains from selecting a dominant approach or develop- ing an overarching model of change. Rather than staking out a defined position, Sakwa cobbles together an ambiguous theoretical framework from modernization approaches, the "transitions" literature, and post-structuralism (Foucault). This pastiche is not only unpalatable to a reader well-versed in the various schools, but fosters incoherence in both analysis and narrative.

The absence of a defined theoretical position would not be a fatal flaw if the book adhered to a central theme. The closest approximation to a thesis are the linked assertions that the collapse of communism has not led to democracy but the "rebirth of politics," and that the new Russian politics is an amalgam of novel and traditional elements from both the tsarist and Soviet periods. Limiting the ex- planatory and heuristic utility of the political renaissance argument is the absence

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of definitions for either "rebirth" or "politics." "Politics" sometimes appears to mean representative democracy, at others pluralism, the existence of civil society, and autonomy from state control (pp. 408-10). A smaller, but irritating, problem is that the author does not seem to be aware of the logical incompatibility between the claim of the non-existence of "politics" under communism and the assertion that elements of communist politics are contained in the Russian political revival. Similar problems of definition and operationalization are found throughout the book, and Sakwa's various uses of the terms "pluralism," "pluralization," "moder- nity," and "modernization" are particularly problematic. The argument of consid- , erable continuity of political forms and behavioral patterns accompanying change is interesting. Yet, Sakwa does not pursue it consistently, and is vague about what has changed and what has not. For example, in the first chapter, he states that by mid-1991 the Soviet system was in a condition of "breakdown, and few of its in- stitutions were capable of reform or regeneration and after the coup were destroyed in their entirety" (p. 17), but asserts a few pages later that after the coup "Russian authorities ... slice by slice ... took over the powers of the Union" (p. 19), an ac- knowledgement of the fact that rather than being destroyed, the vast majority of Soviet institutions were simply absorbed by the "new" Russian state. Similar vagueness pervades the section on the post-communist social structure (pp. 251-56), which, according to Sakwa, includes a "democratic class system" but also a "shadow system" composed of a "whole series of social networks that derived from the past," impeding development but also looking "to the future." Lamentably, the components of the new democratic class system are not identi-

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fied, the "whole series" of old networks is not discussed explicitly, and little rele- vant supporting statistical evidence that might help the reader to understand what the author is talking about is offered.

Much of the problem with the continuity and change argument arises from the author's apparent decision to neglect the models and research findings of the So- viet politics subfield. Background information is essential for establishing the character of the system and its processes prior to fundamental reform and systemic crisis. Particularly because it is addressed to the uninitiated, a textbook on Russian politics should provide a concise model of the previous system. Precise conceptu- alizations of the various components of the old order-institutions, social struc- ture, culture, and so on-are necessary for the undergraduate student audience to understand the dynamic processes that have driven Soviet and Russian politics for the last ten years. Without basic illustrative material, diachronic analysis of . particular institutions, or examination of concrete changes in behavioral patterns, the text's characterizations of both the nature of the transition and the present period ring hollow.

Perhaps it is asking too much of a writer attempting a comprehensive study of Russian politics, especially one designed as a textbook, to provide a central ar- gument or theme. The tumultuous decade since March 1985 has produced an incred- ible amount of raw information that has yet to be processed into an historical record. The autobiographical accounts absoiutely essential for such a record are just beginning to be published. Given these circumstances, the constmction of a

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more or less accurate narrative of this crucial period- just telling the story--is a considerable accomplishment. Russian Politics and Society tells parts of the story very well; its limitations demonstrate that when we begin to approach our subject with theoretically informed questions and seriously attempt to answer those ques- tions through direct reference to the relevant data we will go beyond telling the story and begin to explain Russia and the post-communist condition. .

Judith Kullberg The Ohio State University

John J. Stephan. The Russian Far East: A History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. xxiii, 481 pp. $49.50.

Culminating "a quarter century of research" (p. viii), John Stephan has written what will become the standard history of the Russian Far East, an area he calls "a matrix of overlapping borderlands" (p. 1), at once within and distinct from Siberia, simultaneously connected with and separate from China, Japan, and Korea. Incorporating a breathtaking range of source materials in Russian, Japanese, and Chinese, as well as German, French, and English--but no archives-- Stephan has wrought a tour de force.

With his customarily Spartan prose style, Stephan whisks readers from a dim early period of nominal control by various Korean state entities through the sub- sequent Chinese millennium (sixth to seventeenth centuries) to the Russian entree in a mere fifty pages, pointedly reminding us along the way that in the seven- teenth century imperial Russia "acquired a permanent outlet in the Pacific before it did on the Baltic or Black Sea" (p. 20). Russian sovereignty launched a transformation of the region's ethnic makeup, as the native peoples,. Nivkhi (Giliaks), Tungus, Ainu, and others--to whom only the most passing reference is made--were eclipsed (although not fully eradicated) by Slavs. This is very much a history of the geopolitical Russianization of the Russian Far East.

Stephan rightly focuses attention on the watershed of Russia's second .(and this time successful) bid for the rich and strategic Amur basin at China's expense in the 1850s. The apparent completion of Russia's displacement of China initiated what Stephan views as a unified period, 1860-1938, characterized in the first half by Russia's bluster into Manchuria and war with Japan (after having shown restraint); by large-scale settlement involving cossacks, peasants (including enormous numbers of sectarians), and convicts; by stirrings of a regional consciousness and proto-Far Eastern identity; and by the formation on Russian soil of Chinese, Ko- rean, and Japanese communities in which entrepreneurship flourished and prosti-

. tutes, known as "rice ladies," constituted one of the largest occupational groups. Soon, cries of "yellow peril" could be heard, yet the endemic local labor shortage compelled the drafting of Asians to build the very railroad that supposedly would end the threat of Russia's losing control of its newly won territories to the feared Asian hordes.

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Outbreaks of xenophobia, periodic expulsions, and discrimination notwith- standing, Stephan emphasizes that after 1860 the Russian Far East became an in- ternational emporium distinguished by its cosmopolitanism (there were four sepa- .

rate New Year celebrations in Vladivostok). The twin revolutions of 1917 are said to have had only a marginal effect, but then came civil war (bloody), Japanese in- tervention forces (a fiasco), and the short-lived Far Eastern Republic (1920-22), whose demise combined with the Japanese withdrawal to herald the beginning of the Soviet Far East. And yet Stephan sees continuity with the immediate pre-revo- lutionary period. Sarcastic anecdotes of Bolshevik "revolutionaries" and their or- gies of plunder and pillage (p. 162) yield to an appreciation of the tolerant 1920s and their foreign concessions, which reestablished international links (p. 166).

This interlude turned out to be the "cosmopolitan twilight," "ended by fiat" (pp. 168-72). Many people fled to Harbin, Shanghai, and Kobe, before it became impossible to leave. At this point, Stephan comes close to a nearly unqualified sympathetic moment, expressing regret at the demise of the Far Eastern military commander Vasilii Blucher and others of what Stephan calls the "cohort" of civil war and Far Eastern Republic veterans, who constituted an autonomous local power based with shared views on regional development--and was ruthlessly annihilated by Stalin. The horror was of course visible earlier, but for Stephan the needless de- struction by 1938 of the impressive regional "cohort" marked a malevolent cli- max. He dispenses with the familiar story of the grotesque purges and Kolyma la- '

bor camps economically, with a few harrowing pages and a characterization of it all as the Maksim Gor'kaia epokha--the Maksim Gor'kii (maximum bitter) epoch (p. 232).

Thereafter matters become almost unbearably grim. More space is devoted to the infamous gullibility of American Vice-President Henry Wallace, who visited the Russian Far East during World War II and found no slave labor, than to the Russo-Japanese War. Truman's refusal in September 1945 of Stalin's request for an occupation zone in Hokkaido stands out in Stephan's treatment as pure genius, sparing Japan the division that befell Korea and Germany, rather than as an ill- considered act that may have fed Soviet desires to impose their system in Eastern Europe. Illuminating juxtaposition is made of Khrushchev's speech at Vladivostok in 1959 and Gorbachev's in 1986--naturally, in such a way that recollections of . the former diminish what Stephan implies is the overrated significance of the lat- ter. "Illusions" might be the author's favorite word, applying in equal measure to the Russians and the Japanese.

Stephan's exacting guide revolves around the puzzle of what went wrong. Why, he asks, did the richly endowed and well-positioned Russian Far East not develop . like other frontier societies, such as British Columbia or Hokkaido? He points to geographic, demographic, and economic disadvantages, independent of, yet exac- erbated by, "oppression in the name of progress, militarization in the name of se- curity, homicide in the name of race or class, ecocide in the name of growth" (p. 3). Blame is shared by Russia\USSR, Asian countries, and the United States, but the tragedy is said to have been Russia's. Expectations of a new era following the demise of Communism have already given way to the enduring realities of infras-

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tructural weaknesses, as well as the new evils of inflation, regulatory and legal confusion, managerial inexperience, crime and political uncertainty. In short, "extravagant hopes" have been "dashed again" (p. 299). Meanwhile, the recent in- flux of Chinese has led many to speculate that Russia's displacement of China in these territories may not have been irreversible.

Commenting on the legacy of the Soviet state, Stephan cites the nineteenth- century visionary Nikolai ladrintsev, who in condemning the tsarist autocracy wrote that "administrative measures create neither life nor culture but only illu- sions of them" (p. 196). Soberly, Stephan writes of the "toll that the new [revolutionary] age would extract in intellectual honesty and personal integrity" (p. 171), yet he defiantly observes that "human nature" proved "resistant to social engineering" (p. 178). Relentlessly disparaging as this majestic overview proves to be, its high moral tone serves as indirect testimony to the author's suppressed hopes for a region he knows too well and whose shortcomings he cannot forgive. Stephan's invaluable history will long remain unsurpassed.

Stephen Kotkin Princeton University

James M. Goldgeier. Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy: Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. x, 169 pp. $36.95.

James Goldgeier has written a succinct and readable book around the thesis that world leaders apply to international political negotiations those bargaining strategies honed during successful domestic struggles which catapulted them to the highest political leadership positions in their countries. Using this approach as his starting point, Goldgeier examines the impact on Soviet foreign policy of the leadership styles of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev. Rather than di- lute his analysis by considering the entire gamut of international events which occurred during the post-World War II period, Goldgeier chooses to focus on the bargaining style adopted by each leader in the course of a key foreign policy event during his leadership tenure: Stalin's strategy toward the West in the 1948 Berlin blockade crisis; Khrushchev's handling of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis; Brezh- nev's behavior during the 1973 Middle East war; and finally, Gorbachev's ap- proach to the issue of German unification in 1990. On the basis of such an inves- tigation, Goldgeier concludes that strategies developed with success in one envi- ronment (domestic) often backfire in another context (international).

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter sets forth the ratio- nale and methodology for the study and examines competing models in the expla- nation of foreign policy behavior. Drawing on psychological literature, Goldgeier argues that individuals use "schemas" to navigate in "highly ambiguous settings" (p. 2). These schemas are developed from "vivid and salient" earlier experiences (p. 5) and "the best place to look for the events that shaped each leader's political bargaining style is his so-called succession period" (p. 5). Having established the

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central argument of the book, Goldgeier introduces his methodology--a "variant of a structured, focused comparison of case studies" (p. 8). He plans to examine his case studies in the context of a typology of bargaining styles wherein two basic '

strategies and two tactical choices are available to Ieaders--accommodative or coercive strategies and tactical choices of making or avoiding commitments. Competing models at the systemic (balance of power models) and state (domestic coalition politics) levels, says Goldgeier, address the constraints placed upon leaders but leave unanswered many questions regarding choice of specific strate- gies. This, says Goldgeier, is an important omission because "[a] leader's choice of coercive or accommodative strategies and his tactical choice of strong or weak commitments are important because they can influence both the course of negotia- tions and the terms of their settlement" (p. 10).

In chapter 2, Goldgeier explores the specific domestic bargaining styles devel- oped by each of the major post-Lenin Soviet leaders in the course of their success- ful maneuverings during periods of succession struggles. Stalin used a coercive strategy masked by accommodative rhetoric and avoided making premature com- mitments. Khrushchev succeeded by adopting a highly coercive strategy untem- pered by any accommodative gestures and coupled with public and unambiguous commitments. Brezhnev employed an accommodative strategy but avoided mak- ing commitments. In his route to the top, Gorbachev used a coercive strategy but was wary of making personal commitments.

In chapters 3 through 6, Goldgeier examines in turn each leader's approach dur- ing a key foreign policy event. He argues that in each of these cases Soviet leaders applied to international events bargaining strategies which had worked success- fully at home but failed to achieve optimal outcomes abroad. In these chapters, Goldgeier briefly discusses a secondary case involving the four leaders. For Stalin, he looks at the wartime conferences; for Khrushchev, the events leading to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961; for Brezhnev, the negotiations with the Czechoslovak leadership culminating in the 1968 Soviet decision to invade that country; for Gorbachev, his negotiations with Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik. These are added to "expand the analysis of each leader's style" (p. ix).

During the Berlin blockade crisis (chapter 3), Stalin's overall strategy was co- ercive, but he did attempt at times to play "conciliator" while Foreign Minister Molotov was left to pursue a hardline policy. Western negotiators were soon frus- trated with the Stalinist approach, and Stalin's unwillingness to risk war with the West over Berlin resulted in a strengthened American commitment to Europe and a failure for Stalin's strategy. However, the same bargaining strategy proved suc- cessful for Stalin during the wartime conferences of the, Big Three.

Khrushchev's bluff and bluster during the Cuban missile crisis (chapter 4), ac- companied by risky personal commitments to bold plans of action, continued un- til he faced limits imposed upon him by the external environment. Thus, "[a]s events appeared to be edging toward war, Khrushchev pulled back" (p. 72). During . '

the 1958-61 protracted crisis over Berlin masterminded by Khrushchev, a similar strategy was used. But in this instance, Khrushchev successfully achieved a fait ac- compli--the building of the Berlin Wall. Goldgeier tells us that while Khrushchev

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succeeded in Berlin but failed in Cuba, "in both cases he followed the same pattern of public confrontation, bluster, and bluff that had carried him to the top of the Kremlin hierarchy in his rise to political power" (p. 74).

In the 1973 Middle East war (chapter 5), Brezhnev's strategy was to accommo- date both the Arabs and the United States. He was careful to preserve his options and avoided strong commitments. Even coercive statements which were issued dur- ing the course of the war were couched in careful terms. Brezhnev, Goldgeier con- cludes, was in the end serious about intervening in the war to protect Egypt. But he disputes a "domestic coalition" explanation for this move, arguing that conserva- tive pressure on Brezhnev fails to explain Brezhnev's unequivocal accommodative gestures--such as evacuation of Soviet dependents from Egypt, perhaps as an early signal to the West of coming hostilities, and his efforts at obtaining a ceasefire. As Stalin and Khrushchev deviated from their typical styles when faced with the threat of war, Brezhnev's behavior "was consistent with his domestic style.... But Brezhnev could not tolerate major losses--the destruction of either Egypt or Syria" (p. 91). At that point he briefly changed his strategy. In the 1968 Czechoslovak crisis as well, Brezhnev pursued an accommodative strategy until the prospect of the loss of a socialist ally "compelled him to make a commitment and act coercively" (p. 94). While in 1973 "long-term Soviet power...suffered" (p. 91), Goldgeier presumes but does not explicitly argue that Soviet action in Czechoslovakia was a success.

During the negotiations on German unification, Gorbachev "avoided making commitments to specific positions while trying to take clear, public, personal stands first on the impossibility of German unification and then on the unaccept- ability of German membership in NATO" (p. 109). While this strategy had worked for him at home, it failed in the international arena. Similarly, at Reykjavik, Gor- bachev "had tried to surprise and to pressure his adversary into action, but ... Reagan would not budge" (p. 112).

In his final chapter, Goldgeier reexamines his model. He argues that in each of the cases he studied, more favorable outcomes would have been likely if the leaders had pursued different strategies and tactics. Thus, if Stalin had "negotiated in good faith," the "creation of a West German state and even of NATO might have been placed in doubt..." (p. 114). Khrushchev, by acknowledging that there were mis- siles in Cuba and issuing a call for negotiations, would have undercut the success of the American quarantine (p. 115). Had Brezhnev pressured the Egyptians more strongly to accept an early cease-fire, the United States would have been hard- pressed to oppose the move. Gorbachev might have been able to restrict the terms of German membership in NATO had he strongly backed Genscher's proposal for German unification with restricted NATO membership. Goldgeier argues that struc- turally based explanations fail to explain the "rigidity" demonstrated by these leaders. This suggests that "predispositions can hinder the ability to perceive the external environment" (p. 119). Likewise, domestic politics approaches are better able to explain constraints on a leader's goals, rather than on the strategies he uses to pursue them (p. 123). His model, Goldgeier argues, is thus a useful comple- ment to traditional explanations of foreign policy behavior.

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Goldgeier's beam-like focus on the application of his central thesis to a few cases is both a major strength and a weakness of this book. He argues that strate- gies developed by leaders during their rise to the top (largely an adversarial sce- nario) are those used by them in the international arena. However, the only cases he chooses to study are crisis situations which are also adversarial in nature. Skep- tics may ask whether any correlation seen in such instances may be extrapolated to a larger universe of cases involving allies, smaller states, and neutral countries. By focusing on adversarial scenarios at home and abroad, Goldgeier may in fact see a relationship which can be better explained by other factors. For instance, during the 1948 Berlin blockade, one of Stalin's motivations may have been to preserve the image of the West as an ideological enemy. Therefore, a bargaining strategy which may have led to a more favorable outcome may not have been ac- ceptable to Stalin for domestic and ideological reasons. Finally, Goldgeier, in each leader's case, offers an instance of a successful and an unsuccessful applica- tion of strategy and argues that rigidity with regard to strategy in the "unsuccessful" case was responsible for the failure. Is this a case of post hoc fal- lacy ?

All in all, however, this book is a very important addition to the literature. It raises issues of concern with which scholars in the field must be acquainted.

Vidya Nadkarni Universily of San Diego

Russia and the Third World in the Post-Soviet Era. Edited by Mohiaddin Mesbahi. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. xx, 414 pp. $49.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

This volume is largely a result of the conference "The Transformation of the Former USSR and Its Implications for the Third World," held in Tehran in March 1992. The conference was organized by Professor Mohiaddin Mesbahi and hosted by the Institute for Political and International Studies. The cosponsors of the con- ference included the Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Science and the Department of International Relations of Florida International University. The contributors to the book come from myriad distinguished backgrounds, and the es- says well reflect this rich cultural and intellectual diversity.

Each paper in its own way focuses on a theme pertaining to the future of social- ism, the place of the former socialist states of the East in the contemporary world economic scene, and Soviet/ Russian interactions with the Third World. In particu- lar, the portion of the book on the demise of the Soviet Union provides a refresh- ing perspective on the issue. The discussants expose the fallibility of the thesis-- advanced by pseudo-scholarly journalists and Reagar?ites--that an economic-ideo- logical plot designed and carried out in the Reagan years caused the dismantling of the USSR. The view that pervades the essays legitimately refers to Russia's inter- nal dynamics, Gorbachev's perestroika, and the actions and decisions of other players in pre and post-Reagan times.

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The book consists of four parts. The first, '"The Soviet Collapse, the World Or- der, and Shifting Paradigms," includes four articles. Vendulka Kubalkova contends that the fall of the Soviet Union does not spell the end of socialism. In fact, from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and thereafter, the fitness of the Soviet Union to act as the "vanguard of socialism" was dubious. The author critically probes Western Sovietology and criticizes it for adopting a "tunnel vision" and a "high degree of consensus" about the totalitarian nature of the USSR and commu- nism. Andre Frank takes issue with the views of Lenin, Mao, Reagan and Francis Fukuyama, who see ideology and politics as the driving force. In the real world, asserts Frank, "economics is in command." Gorgey Mirsky refutes Fukuyama's thesis that the failures of Marxism-Leninism leaves Western-style democracy as the only viable model of economic development. The world, contends the author, will not be any more stable now than during the Cold War. Nationalism and reli- gion will continue to arouse the conscience of peoples and movements. Elizabeth Valkenier points to the ascendancy of pragmatism in Soviet economic thinking in the latter years of Brezhnev's reign and implementation of free-market policies under Gorbachev. The new economic thinking also transformed the conduct of in- ternational trade and the foreign aid program.

The second part of the volume includes two contributions on "The Soviet Expe- rience in the Third World." Yuri Krasin contends that Moscow's inclination to su- perimpose socialism on the Third World did not mesh well with the socio-eco- nomic and political conditions of these countries. Moscow treated information about political developments in the Third World selectively. Hence it tended to support leaders who rhetorically expressed support for socialist goals but actually sought "egotistic goals, corporate or personal." Victor Kremeyuk maintains that Gorbachev's new-thinking orientation was not a concession to the West by Moscow for losing the Cold War; rather, it was a "blend of virtue and necessity." Gorbachev found it imperative to restructure the system (perestroika).

The third section encompasses three articles on "Moscow, The United States, and the Third World." Alvin Rubinstein contends that, with the exception of Cuba, the superpower rivalry in the Third World did not affect their "core security com- munity." Under Gorbachev, Soviet policy toward developing nations underwent transformations. Moscow curtailed its economic assistance to its clients, center- ing trade on "mutual advantage and mutual interests." The old threat to the north- ern-tier states of Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan could cease forever with the suc- cess of the CIS. Mark N. Katz looks at the superpower rivalry during the Cold War. The fall of the Soviet Union not only marked the end of this intense rivalry but also the beginning of cooperation between Moscow and Washington, as was diplomatically demonstrated in the Persian Gulf War. Katz maintains that the end of the Cold War also reduces U.S. intervention in the Third World. Public opinion and national-security interests will determine when and where intervention takes place. Roger Kanet and James Alxander examine the impact of the New Thinking and the New World Order on Soviet policy toward the Third World. Both are opti- mistic that the end of the superpower rivalry will diminish regional conflicts and the "role of the military in domestic politics of former client states."

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The final section includes seven essays on Moscow's regional relations. Stephen Macfarlane maintains that supply of arms to African states by Moscow and Washington acted as the "currency of influence." The unfolding of the Cold War doesn't end Moscow's interactions with Africa. Yet the demise of the super- power competition will reduce the role of the military in domestic politics and will allow regional powers like Nigeria and South Africa to play a larger role in manag- ing regional security. Gennady Chufrin emphasizes the need for Russia to formu- late an East Asian-Pacific policy with a focus on augmenting Moscow's economic interests. Russia has both ameliorated and expanded its ties with the region's ma- jor powers. The only gray areas concern relations with North Korea and Japan. Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions and the resultant tensions perturb Moscow. Rus- sia's reluctance to return the southern Kurile islands to Japan obstructs normal re- lations between the two countries. Paradoxically, the author shows his partiality by faulting Tokyo for not facilitating the return of the islands by its refusal to transfer "large scale aid" to Russia. Anatoly Glinkin investigates Moscow's rela- tions with Cuba and Central America. He contends that one of the most agonizing foreign policy issues for Gorbachev was relations with Havana. Economic reali- ties and the rapprochement with Washington made it impractical for the Kremlin to maintain its "special relationship" with Cuba. Thus bilateral relations were put on the basis of mutual advantage. Aldo Vacs looks at the gradual improvements in Moscow's relations with Argentina and Brazil. Argentina's adherence to "ideolog- ical pluralism" and Brazil's "responsible pragmatism" significantly reduced their enmities toward the Soviet Union. In the case of Argentina, the "climax" in im- proved. relations with Moscow manifested itself in Argentina's decision not to join the U.S. boycott on Russia for its invasion of Afghanistan.

The volume's last three articles focus on Moscow's relations with the Middle East. Irina Zviagelskaya and Vitaly Naumkin examine growing interactions be- tween the Gulf Cooperation Council and Russia. Andrei Kozyrev's visit to the GCC in 1992 was the first of its kind by a Russian foreign minister. The authors point out that, since 1993, Russia has adopted a more independent foreign policy line, as was recently demonstrated by its sale of three K-class submarines to Iran and, even more recently, by helping Tehran to build four light water reactors. This new approach in foreign policy, indeed, can be observed in Moscow's attitudes toward the eastward expansion of NATO and the crisis in Chechnya. Yuri Gankovsky chronicles Russian-Afghan relations since the mid-fifteenth century. Bilateral re- lations reached their height in the 1970s when Soviet-built factories were putting out over 60% of Afghanistan's public sector goods. In regard to the Soviet inva- sion of Afghanistan, although it is known that the Defense Ministry played a key role, the rationale for the invasion will continue to elude us for the "lack of neces- sary material." Shireen Hunter focuses on the positives and negatives of the su- perpower rivalry concerning developing states. Although this rivalry paved the way for decolonization and transfer of technological and economic resources, the Cold War also stamped out democratic experimentation in a number of Third World nations, including Iran and Guatemala. As to the northern-tier states and their post-Cold War geostrategic significance, the article calls attention to the West's

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rising hostility toward Iran for its "espousal of militant Islam" in the region. On the other hand, Turkey, because of its pro-West democratic leanings and as the "main conduit" for Western links with the Caucasus and Central Asia, will be treated preferentially by the West.

A brief review cannot do justice to this book; as a whole, the essays provide valuable insight in understanding Russian foreign policy orientations both in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. The book is rich in analysis and prescription. And for those who desire a balanced account of the unraveling of the Soviet Union, it rep- resents an essential addition to the literature. Having said that, the book has one noticeable omission; that is, it lacks a concluding chapter by the editor to cap- sulize the dominant themes of the volume. ' '

Darius A Navran Dyke College

The Soviets, Their Successors and the Middle East: Turning Point. Edited by Rosemary Hollis. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. xiii, 189 pp. $59.95.

Rosemary Hollis, of the Royal United Services Institute, has brought together a group of experienced analysts of the Soviet Union and the Middle East to "docu- ment a turning point in history" (p. 1) by tracing the development of relations between the Soviet Union and its successor states and the Middle East during the 1980s and early 1990s. Ultimately, the effort is not a great success. This has nothing to do with the individual papers; they are of high quality. The problem is rather the familiar one of timing; the project was undertaken much too soon. The latter part of the book makes clear that there was very little to say about Russia and the Middle East or about Central Asia and the Middle East in 1992.

The first two papers do an admirable job of summarizing Soviet policies, and demonstrating when they began to shift. Amnon Sella, on the Arab-Israeli con- flict, places the shift in the Gorbachev period. He emphasizes, however (perhaps too strongly), the continuities in Soviet policy until 1992, as Moscow main- tained its advocacy of an international conference with the participation of the PLO and the USSR, and its rejection of separate peace deals. It seems to this reader that Sella understates both the impetus for and the extent of the policy changes in the Gorbachev period. He plays down the importance of regime changes in both the Soviet Union and Israel in 1984 and 1985. He says that the Soviet attitude to- ward the PLO did not alter substantially after 1985, although policy toward Israel shifted, and works on the assumption that Moscow tried to predicate its policies toward Israel on Israeli policies toward the PLO (p. 19). Avenues were opened to Israel without sacrificing any Arab points of principle (p. 41). Yet the change in Soviet policy toward the Middle East began well before any shift in Israeli policy, and surely must be credited to the advent of Gorbachev and his determination to al- ter fundamentally the bases of Soviet foreign policy.

Shahran Chubin's chapter on Soviet policies toward the Gulf in the 1980s pro- vides an excellent overview of the shift in the Soviet worldview under Gorbachev,

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while demonstrating (somewhat paradoxically) that Soviet policies in the Gulf began to change under Brezhnev. Thus, while the Gulf was still perceived in Moscow in terms of the competition with the United States, concerns about the domestic impact of regional instability and of the spread of Islamic fundamental- ism were already bringing about a convergence of Soviet and American news on Gulf stability. The Gorbachev period confirmed this convergence; to say, as Chu- bin does, that it was not possible to determine in August 1990 if the Soviet Union had become a status quo power in the Gulf seems a considerable exaggeration. What Gorbachev added was a willingness to cooperate with the United States in finding solutions to regional conflicts (or at least containing them), using that cooperation to try to achieve its goals of inclusion in the region.

In the crisis occasioned by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, that cooperative strategy was carried to lengths previously unimaginable. As chronicled by Carolyn Ekedahl and Melvin Goodman, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze jeopardized Soviet economic interests and Soviet personnel in Iraq in order to coordinate policy with Washington. They made it clear that the relationship with the West was central to Soviet policy, to the virtual exclusion of all other previous ties. At the same time, it was clear that there were significant differences between Moscow and Washing- ton over the goals and activities of the coalition forces and of the U.S. as their leader. These differences and the rise of domestic political opposition kept the Soviet government from military participation, and prompt the authors to warn that the dramatic cooperation in the crisis "does not signify the complete congru- ence of U.S. and Soviet interests in the region" (p. 109).

This is essentially the conclusion that Mark Smith comes to (necessarily more intuitively) in his chapter on Russia and the Middle East. His view is that while the Russian government abandoned the old Soviet ties to Third World radical states, and merely followed the U.S. lead in the recent phases of the Arab-Israeli peace process, geographic proximity and concerns about its own security will lead it to reassert itself in the Middle East eventually (especially if an authoritarian regime were to come to power in Moscow). This conclusion seems sound, al- though Smith's belief that the United States will not attempt to impede Russian at- tempts to win friends in the region (p. 124) goes too far, in my opinion. It also seems logical for him to predict that Russia will pursue a "northern tier" strategy in the near future, since in the Middle East only Turkey and Iran have the ability to affect Russia's security and stability, through their activities in the new Central Asian states. The author's tentative prediction that Russia might come to view the latter as its "back yard" (p. 130) has been validated, although it is not clear that they should have been considered as part of the Middle East.

In the final paper, in many ways the most interesting of them all, Shirin Akiner looks at the Central Asian states and the beginnings of their relations with the Middle East. She presents a superb summary of the complexities of the socio- economic development of these new countries and reminds us that the essence of domestic political relationships did not change much from pre-Soviet to Soviet and (by implication) post-Soviet times. She sees Islam as a rallier of anti-Soviet sentiment, but not as a unifying agent across nationalities, and gives little cre-

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dence to the possibility of Shi'a fundamentalism's being adopted; more likely, old clan and rural-urban cleavages will resurface to threaten stability. The section on Central Asia-Middle East relations is necessarily brief, but is useful for the re- minder that Turkey is not modernized or wealthy enough to be seen as a model for Central Asian elites, and that Central Asian economic and other forms of integra- tion with Russia will not be easily overcome.

Stephen Page Queen's University

Central Asia and Transcaucasia: Ethnicity and Conflict. Edited by Vitaly V. Naumkin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. xiii, 242 pp. $59.95.

This is a book that serious scholars and policy makers cannot ignore. It is cer- tainly an academic endeavor which has few peers.

The breakup of the Soviet Union has resulted in the creation of a number of "newly independent states" on its erstwhile territory. These can roughly be divided into the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the Slavic states (the Rus- sian Federation, Belarus, and Ukraine), the Transcaucasian states (Georgia, Arme- nia, and Azerbaijan), the states of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turk- menistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan), and Moldova. To understand these succes- sor states,. particularly the little-known states of Transcaucasia and Central Asia, has presented a challenge to scholars and policy-makers alike. An attempt to ex- plicate the complexities of Transcaucasia and Central Asia, accordingly, is a wel- come addition to scholarship.

'

Most of these Soviet successor states are made up of the titular nationality as well as a number of ethnic minorities. The standard of the "nation state" (one peo- ple, one state), which has in varying degrees influenced all of the emerging states of the former Soviet Union, has produced a number of ethnic conflicts which range from fierce socio-political competition to outright military confrontation. This competition and this conflict--especially in Transcaucasia and Central Asia- must be better understood if the world community, or some portion thereof, is to play a positive role in bringing peace, harmony, and economic prosperity to the region. Although the book deals chiefly with Transcaucasia and Central Asia, it also considers in passing the Muslim and non-Muslim Asiatic minorities in the Russian Federation.

The authors all work for the nonprofit Russian Center for Strategic Research and International Studies, while heretofore they were employed by the Russian Academy of Sciences, either in the Institute of Oriental Studies (Irina Zviagel- skaya, Alexei Malashenko, Sergei Panarin, and Vitaly Naumkin) or in the Institute of Linguistics (Victor Porkhomovsky), or by Moscow State University (Leonid Fridman). The writing and publication of the book was done under a grant from the United States Institute of Peace.

As a whole, the book makes a valuable contribution. Its scholarship is impres- sive. Its writing is generally lucid. And its wealth of detail casts light on a number

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of issues not generally understood by Western observers or even scholars. Yet, as with most books produced by many authors, the work is somewhat uneven in the relevance of its arguments and the quality of its insights. Furthermore, it is some- times tinted by the "old thinking" of Soviet scholarship and the conscious or un- conscious pro-Russian bias of its authors. The book could also have benefitted from a final editing to ensure that all the authors brought their work up to 1994, thus avoiding troublesome anachronisms. All this having been said, however, the book still stands head and shoulders in factual accuracy and meaningful insight above many similar attempts by naive Western scholars to describe and understand the ethnic complexities and the problems of developing civil societies in Tran- scaucasia and Central Asia, one of the most ethnically complex and politically baffling areas of the world.

Vitaly Naumkin argues in his introduction that nationalism is a major obstacle to the establishment of civil society in Transcaucasia and Central Asia (xii), im- .

plying, apparently, consciously or unconsciously, that the old system of central authority could do better. If that were the case, we should ask, then why did it not do better over the past seventy years when it was in power? Ethnic conflict under the Soviet regime was suppressed, sometimes even exacerbated, not remedied. Naumkin erroneously states, in the same place, that Armenia and Azerbaijan have "non-communist and democratically orientated leaders" (p. xii). It should be widely known, however, that Haidar Aliev, president of Azerbaijan, was not only a former communist, a Politburo member and a KGB general to boot, but that he was hardly democratically elected nor is he democratically inclined. Levon Ter- Petrossian, president of Armenia, on the other hand, is indeed a non-communist and was democratically elected. While Aliev is known to practice repression, Ter- Petrossian has thus far allowed opposition parties to operate with relative freedom.

On a more positive note, the first chapter on "Historical Origins of Interethnic Conflicts in Central Asia and Transcaucasia" by Victor Ya. Porkhomovsky, with . the small but important exception cited below, has presented us with one of the most learned, accurate, and enlightening essays on the complex of peoples in Central Asia and Transcaucasia, their origins, history, and present disposition. He accurately points out that the "eastern way" of state formation, based on religious and cultural unity, is different from the "western way," which centers on ethnic unity in the form of the nation state. He insists that a sharp transition from the "Eastern" type to the "European" type can only intensify ethnic tensions and con- flicts in the region (16). In writing about Nagorno-Karabakh, Porkhomovsky cor- rectly but incompletely states that "by resolution of the Caucasian Bureau of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) [the Kavburo] in 1921, Nagornc- Karabakh was left within Azerbaijan" (p. 25), ignoring the significant fact that the Kavburo first voted to attach Nagorno-KarabakJ'1 to Armenia on July 4, 1921, and then changed its decision under pressure from Stalin on July 5, 1921. The Armenian quality of Nagorno-Karabakh, hence, was recognized at an early date of the Soviet era.

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Leonid Friedman presents valuable statistics on the economies of Central Asia and Transcaucasia over the past few years and illustrates the generally declining productivity which, he claims, should be a factor in exacerbating the socio-politi- cal and ethno-national tensions in the area. This indeed may be true. Economic deprivation makes people unhappy and ripe for social discord. Yet the fact remains that the most egregious cases of ethnic conflict in the area under consideration, those of Tajikistan and Nagorno-Karabakh, arose immediately after the breakup of the USSR and before the economies of those regions began their decline. In these two cases, at least, a simple economic determinism teaches us nothing and can in- deed be misleading.

Sergei Panarin raises the important question of whether it is "politics" or "eth- nopolitics" which is the real driving force behind the conflict in Central Asia and Transcaucasia, and indeed in the Russian Federation. He rightly points out that "independent" republics have emerged on the foundations of the Union Republics, with all the formal trappings of statehood; furthermore, that within these states, as within the Russian Federation, there are real ethnic conflicts such as the Nagomo Karabakh-Azerbaijan and the Georgian-Abkhazian, among many others. Yet, asserts Panarin, all these developments cannot be directly ascribed to ethnic motives. "They involved, and still involve, purely political elements of power struggles over such issues as the social basis of power and ways of building up the state and the social system" (p. 84). In Central Asia, Panarin argues, "The region's political elite includes mainly local ex-Soviet nomenklatura as regards both its composition and its general tenor" (p. 81). This allows the elites, if they "fail to quell the opposition by conventional police methods, [to] seek to enlist direct mass support by playing on long-standing contradictions between communities; and if the opposition resorts to the same tactics, covert political struggle erupts into overt quasi-ethnic strife" (p. 87). It should be noted that Panarin makes a small but significant error when he claims that in Central Asia and Transcaucasia the farmers still till state and collective farms (p. 76). He ignores the fact that agriculture in Armenia is well over 60 percent privatized.

Alexei Malashenko has produced a brilliant essay on Islam and politics in the area. By all rights, nationalism should be a divisive force and Islam a unifying force. Yet what we see is that nationalists are using Islam as a political weapon in their struggle for power with the old Soviet internationalist nomenklatura (a situa- tion which complicates the ethno-social-political scene to the degree that it al- most defies understanding), as are "outsiders" seeking their own advantage, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Irina Zviagelskaya reminds us that Central Asia and Transcaucasia have become troubled waters where the "outsiders," Turkey in particular, fish for geopolitical advantage. She argues that such outside interference "demanded a more authorita- tive stand from Russia" (p. 129). Turkey is attempting to use the ethnic factor, she asserts, in shaping a "new regional system, a 'Turkic universe' of sorts" (p. 138). Russia, in Zviagelskaya's view, has no alternative but to resist this intrusion in her traditional sphere of influence.

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Finally, Naumkin writes on the "prospects for settlement of ethno-national conflicts" in the last chapter and in his "Conclusion." Naumkin argues that "Due to its contacts with Central Asia and Transcaucasia, its special interest in stability there, and its diversified potential, Russia could be an effective stabilizer and bro- ker to try to reconcile parties in a conflict" (p. 203). "Obviously," he continues, "the West wants to see Russia as a zone of stability and an effective peacekeeper."

Herein lies the crux of this most interesting and enlightening book. Do the Russians know more about Central Asia and Transcaucasia, an area in their own backyard, than the West; and does special knowledge, experience, and propinquity anoint Russia as the natural peacekeeper in the area? That answer is one that pol- icy-makers in the West must mull over carefully. They must also answer the ques- tion not posed in the book, whether or not the Russians themselves have surrepti- tiously contributed to ethnic conflict in order to make themselves indispensable.

Dennis R. Papazian University of Michigan, Dearborn

Protestantism and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia: The Communist and Postcommunist Eras. Edited by Sabrina Petra Ramet. Durham, NC: Duke Univer- sity Press, 1992. x, 441 pp. $39.95.

This, by far the best and most comprehensive work on the subject in English, opens with a solid attempt by its editor, Professor Ramet, to establish patterns of interaction between Protestant Chruches and their Communist Governments, in other words, to find differences and similarities in time and space. It ends with a lucid and very clearly stated "Afterword" by Dr. Gerd Stricker of the Swiss Glaube in der 2 Welt Institut, in which he draws a summation of the experience of Protestant Churches of living under and accommodating to their Communist regimes over a period of forty-five very difficult years.

Stricker convincingly argues against such misnomers as: Protestantism, as if it were a single phenomenon; Eastern Europe, as if it were anything more than a po- litical term to designate an area of completely different cultural and historical her- itages which have had only one common misfortune of falling under Communist regimes in the the post-World War II period. However, rather surprisingly he par- allels the theological diversity of the the conglomerate of Churches and sects known as Protestant with the diversity of Communist regimes, each having its own religious policy (and diverse policies in relation to different religions in each of the states). To this reviewer it seems the comparison is misleading. Communist regimes may have had different policies depending on the country, the personali- ties of the leaders and politico-historical configurations of the time. But in con- trast to the diversity of Protestant Churches (not to mention other Christian faiths) which have diverse theologies as well, the "theology" (i.e., ideology) of all Communist regimes is the same, the vision of all religions as a class enemy is also universal for all Communist parties. That is why the whole Marxist-Christian dialogue has been an absurd dead-end from the beginning to the present, particu-

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larly in the case of Christians under Communist regimes: the regimes openly tell them, "We shall eventually bury you all before building Communism," and the Christians respond, "Please don't, we'll prove our usefulness to you." And the communists "generously" allow the Christians to exist as long as they are useful to their foreign policy and world image. Is this a dialogue?

Stricker himself unwittingly bears witness to the above in citing the fate of the Confessing Church under the Communists in the GDR. As we know, despite all dif- ficulties, arrests and even deaths in Nazi concentration camps of some of its lead- ers, e.g., Pastor Bonnhoefer, the Confessing Church survived under Hitler, but it was wiped out by the Communists in the very first post-war years, and that was in the GDR, where the policy toward at least the obedient Churches had been the most tolerant of all Communist states--the only Communist country where Churches were allowed a wide scope of charitable, educational and other activities. A minor surprise is that both Ramet in her article on the GDR and Stricker mention Jehovah's Witnesses among the Protestants, whereas they are not Christian to be- gin with, if as an absolute minimum we expect of a Christian to believe in the di- vinity of Christ.

But let us look at the rest of the book. Between these excellent opening and closing articles there are six entries dealing with the Protestants country by coun- try (Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, because of the insignificant numbers of Protestants there, are dealt with in a single article; and the Baltic republics are included in the USSR article, of which they were a part under Communism). Two essays are theo- retical : "Protestantism: Theology and Politics" and "The New Church-State Con- figuration in Eastern Europe," being Ramet's third entry in the book, which is pre- ceded by a well written, informative review by Lawrence Kippenstein of conscien- tious objectors (mostly Protestant-sectarians) in Eastern Europe and the USSR and policy responses pursued by the diverse Communist regimes at different time peri- ods.

For this reviewer as a student of the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union and Russia it was interesting to compare the "taming" of Protestant Churches by the post-war East European Communist regimes with the much bloodier and harsher process of subordinating the Russian Orthodox Church by the Soviet regime of 1920s-30s. In this comparison the Russian Church came out rather well. First, the main line Russian Orthodox Church, even in the person of Metropolitan Sergi, who finally accommodated the Church to the Communist regime in its eleventh year of existence, always maintained that Marxism and Christianity were ideationally incompatible and was never tempted by any Marxist-Christian dialogues. Only the fringe schismatic Renovationist Church practically created by the GPU, according to the newest Soviet archival documents, claimed that Marxism was a social projection of Christianity. In contrast, in the GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania some of the main-line Protestant Churches not only accommodated themselves to their Communist regimes much more quickly, but even proclaimed a close kinship of Christianity and Marxism and developed Marxist-Christian theologies on par with the Liberation theologists in the West. The governing bishop of the Hungarian Reformed Church even had to

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flee to France once the Communist system began to collapse in Hungary, for fear of reprisals for his too active involvement with the Communist system. Yet, for some reason the Western media to the present day does not tire of accusing the Orthodox Church of Russia of collaboration with their Communist masters, but passes over in silence the behaviour of the Protestants under a considerably lighter and briefer terror than the one experienced by the Russian Church. Is that objectivity?

D. Pospielovsky University of Western Ontario

The USSR 1987-1991: Marxist Perspectives. Edited by Marilyn Vogt-Downey. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993. xvi, 544 pp. $60.00.

The writings in this volume deal with the wide-ranging changes which took place in the USSR from 1987 to 1991. All of the chapters of the volume were writ- ten during the years mentioned in the title. The content of the book is diverse, consisting of four types of writings. In the first category are analyses of events in the USSR which were authored by American Trotskyites, which initially appeared in print soon after those events had taken place. In the second group are the re- ports of American Marxists on their travels to the USSR during the period covered. summarizing their observations of trends in progress at that time. Third, the vol- ume also includes several interviews with Soviet scholars and activists. Fourth, a few essays by Soviet authors are also found in the collection.

The American Marxists whose contributions are republished in this book gen- erally prove themselves to have been astute analysts of the Soviet scene, whose insights into what was happening under Gorbachev have stood the test of time better than those of most others. Those authors were quicker than most of Gor- bachev's sympathizers in the West to realize the limits of his program of reform in Soviet institutions, and to note the potential for instability in the changes which Gorbachev initiated. When those observers' comments on perestroika were origi- nally published, their essays had the virtue of being up to date. Today, when those writings are available in the volume edited by Vogt-Downey, on the whole they lack the depth of analysis which would add substantially to the knowledge of changes in the USSR under Gorbachev among those specializing in the study of Soviet history and post-Soviet affairs. Most of the chapters in this volume serve primarily as a record of American Trotskyites' reactions to the rise and fall of Gor- bachev's reforms, and thus will be of interest to students of American Marxism.

The perspective offered by most of the American contributors to this collection is that the restructuring introduced by Gorbachev was designed to serve the inter- ests of the Soviet bureaucratic elite by modernizing the means of its control of so- ciety, but that the internal contradictions of Gorbachev's program of change opened up the possibility of a more fundamental transformation of the system. Those authors saw the working class (urban manual workers) as the social force with the crucial power to determine the future of Soviet society. Their essays raise

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the important question of the nature of the political attitudes and behavior of the working class in the USSR and its successor states-they raise that question, but the purposes for which they were written did not permit an analysis extensive enough to answer that question. The caliber of the writings in this collection raises the hope that its principal contributors will further explore the role of workers in politics in Russia and the other newly independent states.

Alfred B. Evans, Jr. California State University, Fresno